We're Back

Regular posting will now resume.

As my first official act, let me extend a hearty thank you to Kevin LaCroix at The D&O Diary for attempting to compile a comprehensive list (here) of the options backdating related litigation, and to Bruce Carton at Securities Litigation Watch for agreeing to help shoulder the load (here).

The options backdating litigation explosion will almost certainly be the next group of cases that the annual Stanford University /Cornerstone Research, NERA Economic Consulting, and PricewaterhouseCoopers studies exclude from their yearly totals or include with an asterisk, a practice that started back in 2001, with the IPO Allocation cases. The next few years all had their own breed of "atypical" case, except 2005:

2001 - IPO Allocation cases
2002 - Research Analyst cases
2003 - Research Analyst cases and Mutual fund "market-timing" cases
2004 - Mutual fund "market-timing" cases
2005 - ???
2006 - Options backdating cases

When these "atypical" cases have been excluded from the yearly count, the number of new federal securities class action filings has remained fairly steady since the enactment of the PSLRA ten years ago, as explained by Bruce Carton, here.

The "drop" in new case filings that was detailed in a recently released report from Cornerstone Research and the Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse. The report has generated a bit of buzz in the blogosphere, with posts on The 10b-5 Daily here, and The D&O Diary here.

I think a more interesting (and to the best of my knowledge unanswered) question is what happened to the "atypical" cases in 2005?