Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC were appointed class counsel in a proposed class action against Silvergate Capital Corp. that accuses the cryptocurrency-focused firm of failing to alert investors it lacked the necessary protections to detect ongoing money laundering on the platform.

U.S. District Judge Cathy Ann Bencivengo on Tuesday issued the order appointing class counsel and designating their clients — International Union of Operating Engineers Local No. 793, Members Pension Benefit Trust of Ontario, UMC Benefit Board Inc., Wespath Institutional Investments LLC, Indiana Public Retirement System, Boston Retirement System and Public School Teachers’ Pension & Retirement Fund of Chicago — as lead plaintiffs.

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Judge Bencivengo said she found the institutional investors made a “sufficient preliminary showing” that they satisfy the typicality and adequacy requirements for lead plaintiff and that Bernstein Litowitz and Cohen Milstein are “reasonable” choices for class counsel.

“Both firms specialize in representing investors in nationwide class actions and have served as lead or co-lead counsel in numerous securities class actions that resulted in significant recoveries for class members,” the order states.

The suit was filed against Silvergate in December, claiming more than $425 million was laundered on Silvergate’s platform before the company went public in 2019.

Silvergate investors said the truth about the money laundering came to light in November when research firm Marcus Aurelius Value tweeted that recently subpoenaed Silvergate bank records showed $425 million in transfers from Silvergate cryptocurrency bank accounts to what the research firm described as South American money launderers. Marcus Aurelius Value conducts due diligence on publicly traded companies.

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The investors are represented by Jonathan D. Uslaner, Hannah Ross, John Rizio-Hamilton, Avi Josefson and Scott R. Foglietta of Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP, and Carol V. Gilden, Steven J. Toll, Jan E. Messerschmidt and Brendan R. Schneiderman of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

Read the article on Law360.

An Illinois federal judge gave class status to a group of about 13,500 Black workers who say they were turned away from temporary jobs at a beauty product manufacturer by three staffing agencies because of their race, noting that testimony suggests the manufacturer had a common employment policy.

U.S. District Judge John J. Tharp Jr. rejected arguments from Vee Pak LLC and Staffing Network Holdings LLC that litigating the decade-old claims would require too many individualized inquiries, ruling Tuesday that not every member of the proposed class needs to prove harm before it can be certified.

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Joseph Sellers of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, who is representing the class, told Law360 the 50-page opinion was a “very thoughtful, thorough treatment of the subjects that affect class certification.”

“This has been going on a long time, and our clients have waited a very long time for relief,” Sellers said. “We feel like we’re close to the light at the end of the tunnel here.”

He added that barring any challenge to the class certification, he expects the court will set a trial date later this year.

Vee Pak, Staffing Network and Alternative Staffing are also part of a suit filed by the Illinois attorney general in May. According to the complaint, six staffing agencies engaged in a three-year conspiracy, supported by Vee Pak, to refrain from recruiting or otherwise poaching the temporary workers they assigned to the beauty product manufacturer’s facilities in order to lessen competition.

Sellers said that while they’re two separate cases, he thinks the Illinois attorney general has found, as he has, that some staffing agencies cater to the prejudices of companies they work with.

“Not only is that unlawful, but it’s the kind of practice that should end for the entire industry,” he said. “And we hope that these cases will help bring that to an end.”

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The class is represented by Joseph M. Sellers and Harini Srinivasan of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, by Christopher J. Williams of the National Legal Advocacy Network, and by Christopher J. Wilmes and Caryn C. Lederer of Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym Ltd.

Read the article on Law360.

A new online group, which kicked off as a partnership between Florida Lawyers Assistance and the Florida Bar’s Standing Committee on Mental Health and Wellness of Florida Lawyers, is meant to provide a space where attorneys can discuss managing those diagnoses amid the various stressors of being a lawyer.

The idea for the group came about when Rachael Flanagan connected with the bar’s mental health standing committee chair Karl Klein about how she could get involved with its work.

Read Depression, Bipolar Support Group Launches For Fla. Attys for the full story.

Crypto, Big Tech and the threat of a commercial real estate bubble are some of the areas plaintiffs attorneys are closely watching as targets of potential securities litigation this year.

Securities litigation filings may have settled in at a “baseline” of 200 to 225 cases per year after a two-year deviation in 2018-2019 to roughly twice that caseload due to issues emanating from SPACs, but settlement values have skyrocketed.

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The crypto conundrum: As the caseload of SPAC filings will drop off, “cryptocurrency may replace it,” Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll partner Julie Goldsmith said. However it remains unclear “how it will play out for securities fraud litigation more broadly, since larger institutional clients tend not to hold cryptocurrencies.” The crypto space generally “should lead to enormous settlements, but for the most part the money just doesn’t exist, it simply evaporated,” Reiser said.

The article can be read on The National Law Journal (subscription required).

Centene Corp. has agreed to pay more than $215 million to resolve California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s allegations that the health care company defrauded the Golden State’s Medi-Cal program by falsely reporting higher prescription drug costs incurred by two of its managed care plans, Bonta announced Wednesday.

The St. Louis, Missouri-based company, which is the country’s largest provider of Medicaid insurance plans, agreed to the nine-figure deal, roughly half of which will be paid to the Medi-Cal program in restitution, without admitting liability and in doing so, resolved Bonta’s claims against it under the California False Claims Act.

Bonta said in a statement Wednesday that Medi-Cal is a lifeline that provides access to free or affordable health care services for millions of Californians, and when companies overcharge the Medi-Cal system, it drains valuable resources from the people who rely on the program.

“Today’s settlement is a win — it brings resources directly back to our state,” Bonta said. “At the California Department of Justice, we will continue using every tool we have to fight for California’s vulnerable communities.”

Read Centene Cuts $215M False Claims Act Deal With Calif. AG.

Cohen Milstein was Relator Counsel in this matter.

The Tenth Circuit on Thursday rejected a radiology company’s bid to force into individual arbitration a federal benefits lawsuit from workers who alleged mismanagement of their employee stock ownership plan. The panel upheld an arbitration provision in ESOP plan documents as unenforceable because it blocked remedies under federal benefits law.

A three-judge panel in a 41-page published opinion sided with the workers’ argument — backed up by the U.S. Department of Labor, which participated as amicus on behalf of workers in the case — that an arbitration provision tucked in Envision workers’ ESOP plan documents impermissibly blocked remedies under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. That triggered the so-called effective vindication doctrine under the Federal Arbitration Act, which permits a court to overrule an arbitration agreement if it blocks a party from being able to bring claims under federal law.

“[We] reject defendants’ arguments and conclude that the district court properly invoked the effective vindication exception to invalidate the arbitration provisions of the plan document,” the panel said.

. . .

U.S. Department of Labor spokesperson Grant Vaught complemented the appellate court’s “thoroughly reasoned” decision in a statement provided to Law360 on Thursday.

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Robert Harrison and the proposed class are represented by Rachana Pathak, John Stokes and Peter K. Stris of Stris and Maher LLP and Ryan Wheeler, Michelle C. Yau and Kai H. Richter of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

A retail display manufacturing company has agreed to settle a proposed class action filed in Illinois federal court alleging it violated federal benefits law when it sold inflated company shares to workers through their employee stock ownership plan in a $106 million deal.

Triad Manufacturing Inc. workers James Smith and Jerry Honse; Triad’s board of directors; and the ESOP’s trustee, GreatBanc Trust Co., alerted the court Wednesday that they’ve reached an agreement on the financial terms of a settlement to shutter the suit alleging Employee Retirement Income Security Act violations.

U.S. District Judge Ronald A. Guzman agreed Thursday to pause court deadlines in the case given that a settlement is on the horizon, and said that the parties should file a motion for preliminary approval on the deal by March 21.

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Attorney Mary J. Bortscheller, who represents the workers, told Law360 on Thursday that she is very pleased her team has secured a settlement for their clients and the proposed class.

. . .

The workers are represented by Michelle C. Yau, Mary J. Bortscheller and Daniel R. Sutter of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and by Nina Wasow and Dan Feinberg of Feinberg Jackson Worthman & Wasow LLP.

Read the article on Law360 (subscription required).

“Plaintiffs claim that the Salvation Army was the primary beneficiary of their relationship, and back that allegation up with details about how essential and beneficial their work was for defendant, the minimal value and effectiveness of the rehabilitation services they received, and the way in which their work prevented them from pursuing rehabilitation,” the judge wrote.

The Salvation Army must face wage-and-hour claims brought by participants in its residential adult rehabilitation programs after a federal judge in Illinois found the plaintiffs may be able to prove they were employees.

In a Jan. 31 opinion, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division denied the Salvation Army’s motion to dismiss a complaint alleging it has violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and related state wage-and-hour laws for years by failing to pay minimum wage to the plaintiffs, and others, who live and work in its adult rehabilitation centers.

The plaintiffs have alleged violations of the FLSA, Illinois Minimum Wage Law, and Michigan Workforce Opportunity Wage Act, arguing that they were employees of and performed work for the defendant.

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Counsel for the plaintiffs, Christine Elizabeth Webber of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in Washington, D.C., said she and her clients “are grateful that the court in Illinois agrees that their claims may proceed.”

“Our clients—many of whom are unhoused, suffer from mental illness, or are overcoming addiction—have been taken advantage of in the name of ‘rehabilitation,’” Webber said, adding that Shah’s ruling ”brings us one step closer to holding the Salvation Army accountable for its predatory adult rehabilitation centers, which prey on vulnerable individuals.”

Read the story on Law.com.

Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC worked on hundreds of millions of dollars worth of settlements for drug buyers, chicken consumers and poultry plant workers in the past year, marking the firm as one of Law360’s 2022 Competition Groups of the Year.

Cohen Milstein was one of the firms that successfully negotiated a $485 million settlement, thus resolving multidistrict antitrust claims accusing Ranbaxy Pharmaceuticals of improperly acquiring exclusivity periods for the antiviral drug Valcyte, high blood pressure drug Diovan and reflux medication Nexium, which set back the launch of generic versions and maintained inflated prices.

“It’s a tremendous settlement on behalf of two different classes,” Cohen Milstein antitrust partner Sharon K. Robertson said.

Cohen Milstein represented direct purchasers like wholesalers who, along with end-payer plaintiffs including health care plans, received final approval for the deal in September. However, U.S. District Judge Nathaniel M. Gorton reduced the attorneys’ initial $133 million request by about 27% to approximately $97 million, because the slice of the “megafund” they were seeking wasn’t on par with fee awards in similar cases.

Robertson argued the case is helping push “systemic change” in pharmaceuticals, a major goal of Cohen Milstein’s litigation in the industry, by discouraging settlements between drugmakers of the kind alleged here to be anti-competitive.

She pointed specifically to a reduction in a kind of settlement resolving patent infringement litigation that brand drugmakers file against would-be generics rivals, in which the brand drugmakers agree not to market their own “authorized generic” during an initial period of exclusivity enjoyed by the first generic drugmaker to file an application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

So-called pay-for-delay or reverse payment litigation targeting deals staving off generic competition have gotten a major boost from the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2012 Actavis decision holding such agreements to be anti-competitive under the right circumstances. But Robertson noted that the Federal Trade Commission tracked a dramatic drop in no-authorized generic and similar settlements years after Actavis.

“I think that that’s in no small part due to private plaintiffs pursuing these types of cases and demonstrating through these cases that this type of conduct is in fact anti-competitive,” Robertson said. “It makes these defendants change the way that they behave and how they settle cases going forward.”

Cohen Milstein has also scored key wins representing end-consumer plaintiffs alongside Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP in a sprawling antitrust lawsuit alleging more than a dozen major broiler chicken producers, including Sanderson Farms Inc. and Perdue Foods, conspired to limit chicken production to boost prices.

The case, currently bound for an initial trial in September, has seen a number of settlements, including consumer deals with Fieldale Farms, Peco Foods, George’s, Tyson Foods, Pilgrim’s Pride and Mar-Jac Poultry totaling $181 million that received final approval in December 2021. Consumers also scored a major victory over remaining producers in May when U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin granted them, both indirect buyers and direct purchasers, class certification.

The $181 million in consumer settlements, according to antitrust practice co-chair Brent W. Johnson, is “a credit to a great collaboration” with Hagens Berman and with counsel for the other classes.

In addition to case-specific strategy, Johnson said the successes come mainly from the firm’s usual approach that includes “large, well-integrated, cohesive teams … that are able to prosecute a case against 18 defendant processors who all have slightly different stories, a ton of facts, take 180 depositions across the case and handle massive efforts to get the class certified.”

Johnson noted that one of the things that sets the case apart is its sheer size. “Its breadth in terms of how many people have actually bought the relevant product is unmatched,” he said.

Plaintiffs firms are off to a dynamic start into 2023 with diverse partner classes and a strong commitment to antitrust, MDL and health care litigation.

U.S. plaintiffs firms are kicking off the year with a strong round of partner promotions tied to growing caseload and a commitment to firm culture that emphasizes in-house elevation over lateral hires.

. . .

Other firms “might say we can’t make so many partners or we can’t make everyone a partner,” Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll managing partner Steven Toll said. “We really don’t think that way. We really just look at the candidates and if we think they are deserving, we’ll make them a partner.”

Here are some of the takeaways in detail:

Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll

The firm continues to grow its partner ranks in its strongest two practice areas. “The two largest areas traditionally for many years until now in the firm are antitrust and securities. That’s where probably 50 to 60% of the lawyers are,” Toll said. Overall, the firm has seen “more and more talented lawyers approaching us wanting to join a plaintiffs practice.”

Partner promotions:

Read the article on Law.com.