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Daniel Sommers, a partner in our Securities Litigation & Investor Protection practice, has been invited to speak at the National Association of Pension Plan Attorneys Legal Education Conference, June 18, 2026 at the Amway Grand Plaza in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Dan’s panel, “The Evolving Enforcement Priorities of the SEC and Its Impact on Institutional Investors”, will discuss recent regulatory changes, their effects on securities and corporate governance litigation, and strategies for public funds to safeguard plan interests amid a rapidly evolving legal environment.

Moderator:

Maya Saxena, Saxena White

Presenters:

Daniel Sommers, Cohen Milstein

Nell Minow, ValueEdge Advisors

In the two years since the U.S. Supreme Court eased the requirements for bringing workplace discrimination claims in Muldrow v. St. Louis, courts’ cautious approach to applying the worker-friendly standard has allowed more bias cases to proceed without opening the floodgates, experts said.

In the Muldrow ruling , handed down April 17, 2024, the justices unanimously disavowed the heightened legal hurdles that some lower courts had imposed to block workplace bias cases over employment actions considered to have less serious consequences.

Under the justices’ standard, employees need not show they faced “significant” harm, but rather “some harm,” to move their suits ahead.

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Worker-side attorney Harini Srinivasan, a partner in Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC’s civil rights and employment litigation practice, agreed. She said Muldrow hasn’t “opened the floodgates” but has “meaningfully moved the needle.”

“It results in a broader, more realistic understanding of harm that’s influencing multiple areas of employment law but still being worked out in a fairly disciplined way in the lower courts,” she said.

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“Claims that might once have been dismissed as too minor — whether involving transfers, assignments or delays in accommodation — are now getting further into litigation, including past summary judgment,” Cohen Milstein’s Srinivasan said.

Fighters suing UFC over allegations of wage suppression have asked a Nevada federal judge to impose terminating sanctions on the organization and its parent company, TKO Operating Co. LLC, for failing to turn over court-ordered documents.

The fighters said in a Tuesday motion that they are seeking sanctions, including default judgment, against UFC operator Zuffa, its parent company TKO, and TKO majority owner Endeavor Group Holdings Inc., for “repeated misconduct and violations” of the court’s orders. The defendants have refused to meet and confer and have stonewalled on producing court-ordered materials and information, the fighters said.

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The individual fighters and proposed class are represented by Eric L. Cramer, Michael Dell’Angelo, Patrick F. Madden, Robert Maysey and Joshua P. Davis of Berger Montague, Joseph R. Saveri, Kevin E. Rayhill and Chris Young of the Joseph Saveri Law Firm LLP, Richard A. Koffman, Benjamin D. Brown and Daniel H. Silverman of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and W. Joseph Brucker, Kyle Pozan and Brian Clark of Lockridge Grindal Nauen PLLP.

Lyzette Wallace, Discovery Counsel in our Securities Litigation & Investor Protection practice, will speak at The Sedona Conference at the Asher Adams Hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah on April 23, 2026 at 2 pm (MT).

The panel program, Enhancing the Effectiveness of Rule 26(f) Conferences: Updates from The Sedona Conference Drafting Team, will address the goals and structure of the forthcoming commentary on Rule 26(f) and how it may impact the discovery process. Panelists will highlight key themes and emerging best practices identified during the drafting process and will explore how early and cooperative engagement can lead to more efficient, proportional, and effective discovery outcomes. The session will also address practical considerations for both counsel and the courts, including preparation strategies, the use of checklists, local rules, and individual practices to foster meaningful participation, as well as the role of Rule 37 in enforcing compliance.

Panelists:

Emily B. Jennings, Paul Hastings LLP

Brittany Resch, Strauss Borrelli PLLC

Lyzette Wallace, Cohen Milstein

Jack Woodcock, Pierce Atwood LLP

Learn more and register for the Sedona Conference

The Sedona Conference is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(3) research and educational institute dedicated to the advanced study of law and policy in the areas of antitrust law, complex litigation, intellectual property rights, and data security and privacy law. The mission of TSC is to move the law forward in a reasoned and just way through the creation and publication of nonpartisan consensus commentaries and through advanced legal education for the bench and bar.

An Illinois federal judge overseeing broiler chicken price-fixing litigation gave his early blessing Tuesday to a settlement that end users struck with Agri Stats Inc. that calls for the data service to either cease or substantially change the reports it compiles for protein industry subscribers.

Preliminarily approving Agri Stats’ proposed settlement with end users is warranted in the sprawling litigation because the parties have agreed to dismiss a pending summary judgment appeal and bear their own costs while the company makes “what I believe to be substantive changes in their policies, which certainly seems like a fair and reasonable settlement,” U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin said during a brief remote hearing.

“There are benefits to the class in the sense that Agri Stats is still in the business of providing data to the broiler chicken market,” Judge Durkin said. But the settlement calls for changes to the types, timing and display of such data, which “certainly would make any potential abuse of that data less likely,” he said.

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The broiler chicken end users are represented by Shana Scarlett, Steve Berman and Breanna Van Engelen of Hagens Verman Sobol Shapiro LLP and Brent Johnson, Benjamin Brown, Daniel Silverman, Alison Deich and Zachary Glubiak of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.

AT&T Inc. has agreed to settle a proposed class action that aimed to represent 300,000 workers claiming it shorted employees on their pension payments by using outdated mortality data to calculate married couples’ benefits, according to a California federal court filing.

AT&T and the group of workers behind the Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit filed a notice with the court Friday stating that they have struck a deal to end the dispute, and that they are in the process of finalizing terms. Details of the agreement have not been shared with the court.

The settlement would close the suit that the group of employees filed against AT&T in October 2020. ERISA requires that pension payments provided to single employees and married employees must be actuarially equivalent, but the workers claimed AT&T used mortality data that was 40 years old to convert the single life annuities to joint survivor annuities, which led to inaccurate payments.

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The workers are represented by Kai Richter, Michelle C. Yau, Daniel J. Sutter and Caroline Bressman of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC; Peter K. Stris, Victor O’Connell, John Stokes, Colleen R. Smith and Rachana A. Pathak of Stris & Maher LLP; Todd Jackson and Nina Wasow of Feinberg Jackson Worthman & Wasow LLP; and Shaun P. Martin of the University of San Diego Law School.

Former Church of Scientology members asked a Florida federal judge to lift the stay on their trafficking claims against the church, arguing that the arbitration the parties attended was an unfair, opaque process controlled by the church.

Plaintiffs Gawain and Laura Baxter and Valeska Paris asked U.S. District Judge Thomas P. Barber in a motion Thursday to reconsider his order staying their lawsuit and ordering them to first resolve their disputes internally with the organization before going to court.

In the motion, the plaintiffs, who are former seagoing members of the church, said they made a good faith effort to arbitrate their claims under Scientology’s arbitration process. But the arbitrators said they would not apply the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which the plaintiffs claimed was violated, or state contract law regarding the validity of the arbitration agreements in question, according to the motion.

“Whatever leeway the law grants to arbitrators, Eleventh Circuit precedent is clear that it cannot condone a process that rejects the application of relevant substantive law and does not reach a resolution,” the plaintiffs said.

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The plaintiffs are represented by Gregory P. Hansel, Shana M. Solomon and Elizabeth F. Quinby of Preti Flaherty Beliveau & Pachios Chtd. LLP, Shelby Leighton of Public Justice, Manuel J. Dominguez, Theodore Leopold, Agnieszka M. Fryszman and Brendan Schneiderman of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Joseph C. Kohn and Zahra R. Dean of Kohn Swift & Graf PC and Warren A. Zimmerman of Warren A. Zimmerman PA.

A Missouri federal judge refused Thursday to let a Berkshire Hathaway unit duck an antitrust lawsuit over real estate broker compensation rules, concluding the company cannot use its relationship with subsidiary brokerage HomeServices of America Inc. or a major settlement that HSA struck in a related case.

U.S. District Judge Stephen R. Bough said HSA’s $250 million deal — inked in parallel to a $418 million National Association of Realtors settlement that promised to overhaul the home-buying process in the United States — explicitly excluded HSA parent company Berkshire Hathaway Energy Co.

Nor, Judge Bough said, can Berkshire Hathaway win summary judgment against claims of anticompetitive conspiracy by arguing it and HSA amount to a “single enterprise” that cannot conspire with itself.

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The class is represented by Alexander Aiken, Beatrice Franklin, Floyd G. Short, Marc M. Seltzer, Steven G. Sklaver, George R. El-Khoury and Matthew R. Berry of Susman Godfrey LLP, Robert A. Braun, Daniel H. Silverman, Benjamin D. Brown and Sabrina Merold of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Brandon J.B. Boulware and Jeremy M. Suhr of Boulware Law LLC, Eric L. Dirks of Williams Dirks Dameron LLC, Michael S. Ketchmark and Scott A. McCreight of Ketchmark & McCreight PC, and Steve W. Berman, Jeannie Y. Evans, Nathan Emmons and Rio S. Pierce of Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP.

The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission is embroiled in a fight with state gambling authorities for jurisdiction over prediction markets. Yet some former CFTC officials question whether the agency is up to the task of regulating these venues, which list all manner of unusual contracts, and are growing at a blistering pace.

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Shrinking staff, growing remit

The biggest concerns with prediction markets relate to insider trading and market manipulation.

The third ex-CFTC official says that insider trading investigations alone require a huge amount of resources, and that the CFTC at present “doesn’t have enough people to undertake enforcement that will be needed to police [prediction] markets.”

As of 2025, the CFTC had cut 21.5% of its payrolled staff, with the enforcement division especially hollowed out. The CFTC’s flagship Chicago office was at the heart of regulating participants on CME, the largest US futures exchange. Up until last month, it was considered the CFTC’s most powerful unit, but it has had its team of 20enforcement attorneys reduced to zero.

“The enforcement attorneys in the CFTC Chicago office were the experts on trading and manipulation on the CME. Now, there’s not one attorney,” says Christina McGlosson, the former acting director of the CFTC’s Whistleblower Office. “Does that mean that only the CME will enforce anti-manipulation rules on its exchange, while the CFTC focuses elsewhere?”

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s latest performance report underscored its dramatically realigned priorities, signaled an enhanced focus on securing settlements before filing suit, and promised a wider embrace of artificial intelligence and other new technologies in its work, experts said.

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The focus on curtailing anti-American bias represents another significant departure from agency past practices, said Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC partner Joseph M. Sellers, founder and co-chair of the worker-side firm’s civil rights and employment practice.

“Historically, national origin discrimination was viewed as treating people adversely because they have a different national origin than those from the country, meaning immigrants, people who have a different surname, accents, or cultural customs that would distinguish them,” Sellers said. “That’s how courts have very consistently focused those protections under Title VII.”

Sellers said the agency’s focus has now shifted to practices it contends “show a receptivity to immigrants as employees.”

The EEOC highlighted in the report a $1.4 million consent decree it struck last year in what it called a “foreign-preference” national origin discrimination lawsuit against LeoPalace, a major hotel and resort in Guam.

“It’s a profoundly different way to look at national origin discrimination, compared to the way courts have looked at this for 50 years,” Sellers said.