After the Decision in SEC v. Ripple: Now What?

What’s Next in SEC v. Ripple?

Patrick Daugherty, who heads Foley and Lardner’s digital assets practice, told CoinDesk via email that while both parties lost motions they may want to appeal, the ruling on secondary trades – which favored Ripple – is perhaps the most significant.

“It’s a key loss for the SEC because it takes the wind out of the SEC’s sails in other cases where tokens are trading on exchanges, especially if they’ve been trading there for years,” Daugherty said.

Another attorney, who asked not to be named, said they could see the SEC appealing that specific portion of the July 2023 ruling, calling it a “significant loss” for the regulator.

With Hours Tenuous, New Metric Looks to Baseball to Assess Lawyer Productivity

Although multiple groups have charted a modest rise in productivity this year, the number of hours that lawyers bill has arguably become a less useful measure of the work they do and the revenue they generate, and has generally continued declining even as firms have become more profitable than ever over the last decade-plus.

But a new report suggests the legal industry can and should measure production in much the way baseball teams do: by making relative comparisons within peer groups.

To that end, the Thomson Reuters Institute this week announced a new metric called the “relative performance measure,” which attempts to capture lawyers’ economic output relative to similarly situated timekeepers, rather than simply their labor input. Researchers behind the report assert the new metric is more strongly correlated to profitability.

Similar to professional baseball, where players’ production is often gauged by their performance relative to a standard “replacement-level” player at their position, the RPM uses timekeeper-level data on hours worked, rates charged, fees generated and collection speeds to compute a “replacement-level” score among categories of lawyers to calculate the over- or under-performance of timekeepers in those areas.

9 Big Law Firms See Work From SEC’s Latest Enforcement Action

At least nine large law firms drew work from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s latest enforcement action this week against 26 broker-dealers, corporate insiders and others for widespread recordkeeping failures.

Davis Polk & Wardwell; Sidley Austin; Foley & Lardner; Milbank; Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr; King & Spalding; K&L Gates; Schulte Roth & Zabel; and Morgan, Lewis & Bockius were among the firms listed as defense counsel for the 26 charged firms.

Online Retailer Hit with Privacy, Security, and Forced Labor-Related Securities Suit

Here at The D&O Diary, we track new securities class action lawsuit filings to identify emerging litigation trends and to track filings that reflect existing trends. Every now and then, we spot new suits that reflect multiple different trends in a single complaint. A new securities lawsuit filed earlier this week against Chinese online retailer PDD Holdings (formerly known as Pinduoduo) is an example of one of these multi-trend suits. As discussed below, the lawsuit shows how privacy-related issues, cybersecurity issues, and geopolitical issues can translate into securities class action litigation. A copy of the August 13, 2024, complaint against PDD can be found here.

SEC Agrees to Dismiss Civil Suit Against Former Pharma Co. CIO

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission agreed to dismiss its civil suit against former Mylan executive Ramkumar V. Rayapureddy, in what his Linklaters counsel are deeming as a “second victory” after the government also dismissed parallel criminal charges earlier this year just shy of a trial.

In a stipulated dismissal Tuesday, the SEC agreed that it would dismiss the civil action against the pharmaceutical chief information officer with prejudice, with each party bearing its own fees and costs.

“We are delighted that Ram has been fully vindicated of these meritless allegations,” Rayapureddy’s lead counsel, Adam Lurie, a partner at Linklaters, said of the outcome. “He has shown remarkable courage and resilience throughout this long injustice and is looking forward to moving on with his life and his career.”

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Lurie led the defense team along with partners Doug Davison and Richard Smith. John A. Schwab, Attorney at Law, LLC of Pittsburgh, served as co-counsel.