Related Practices
Related Industries
|
Covington regularly represents clients in high-stakes securities, derivative, and transactional matters. A committed group of senior litigators specialize in securities litigation, including a former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission's San Francisco office and six former prosecutors who are active in our White Collar Defense & Investigations practice. The Securities Litigation practice has extensive experience representing clients before the SEC, U.S. Attorneys’ offices, securities and commodities exchanges, and banking regulators.
Our securities litigators handle cases in courtrooms across the country, before arbitration panels and in bankruptcy court. Our practice focuses principally on three areas:
Complex Securities and Other Instruments. We represent issuers, underwriters, indenture trustees and investment managers in lawsuits concerning corporate bonds and asset-backed securities. We also represent parties in disputes over commodities swaps and other derivative instruments. Our securities litigators combine their expertise in financial and securities markets with their knowledge of the latest in exotic securities.
Shareholder Class Actions and Derivative Litigation. We defend securities class action lawsuits against underwriters, issuers, and individual officers and directors as well as shareholder derivative actions.
Transactional Disputes. When our clients face tender offer, proxy and other change-of-control litigation, our securities litigators are ready to take the case to court. We also handle post-transaction disputes and litigations over “busted” deals for both private and public companies.
On a highly selective basis, we also prosecute securities law and breach-of-duty claims on behalf of institutional investors.
Representative Matters
- Represented Freddie Mac in approximately 20 securities class action and derivative lawsuits brought in the wake of the Company’s $5 billion restatement of its earnings for 1999-2002. The lawsuits charged that Freddie Mac fraudulently inflated the price of its stock by “smoothing” its earnings. After an important victory on a novel defense to plaintiffs’ class certification motion, we obtained a very favorable comprehensive global settlement of the actions in April 2006.
- Defended UBS against securities fraud claims arising out of the sale of CDO equity to a financial institution. A team of securities litigators and Financial Institutions & Services lawyers collaborated to obtain pretrial rulings reducing claims with a total value of over $136 million in damages to a maximum potential recovery of barely more than $13 million. The case settled favorably on the first morning of trial.
- Since 2002, we have represented SG Cowen and Société Générale in proceedings arising from a branch manager’s embezzlement of over $100 million from brokerage customers. After reaching resolutions with securities regulators, we defended customer claims seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. We took to hearing several matters that could not be settled on favorable terms and obtained arbitration awards that either denied damages entirely or awarded a small fraction of the amounts claimed.
- In 2005, Carl Icahn launched a proxy contest for control of our client, Kerr-McGee Corporation, in which Icahn demanded board representation and sought to impose broad changes in Kerr-McGee's strategic direction. We engineered a favorable settlement pursuant to which Icahn dropped his demands. While defending the action, Covington litigators also worked with the firm’s Corporate and Antitrust experts in orchestrating a dramatic restructuring of the Company, including an IPO spin-off and related debt financings valued at approximately $800 million.
- When Calpine Corporation sought to free over $400 million in asset sale proceeds pursuant to the indentures for certain classes of its high-yield bonds, we conducted an expedited trial against the indenture trustee in Delaware Chancery Court.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|