Alison Frankel

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check and Prickett, Jones & Elliott have absolutely nothing against Delaware Chancery Court. They’d be crazy if they did: The two firms were just awarded a record-setting $300 million fee for their work in the $1.3 billion Southern Peru derivative suit. Kessler Topaz and Prickett Jones lawyers make a very good living by litigating in Delaware.

So why, you might wonder, did the two firms team up with Klausner, Kaufman, Jensen & Levinson to file nine — yes, nine — complaints this week against corporations with bylaws mandating Delaware as the exclusive forum for shareholder litigation?

According to Lee Rudy of Kessler Topaz, it’s because the firms have had it with corporations attempting to curtail shareholder rights. “These cases aren’t saying Delaware is not an appropriate venue,” Rudy told me. “We want to allow the Chancery Court to say whether what these companies are doing is proper under Delaware law.” In parallel suits against Chevron, Curtiss-Wright, Danaher, Priceline, SPX, Superior Energy, AutoNation, Franklin Resources, and Navistar, the plaintiffs’ firms assert that the corporations adopted exclusive forum bylaws without consulting shareholders. Such bylaws, they argue, “conflict with federal constitutional and statutory provisions and impinge on federal jurisdiction and the jurisdiction of other state courts.”

Kessler Topaz and Prickett Jones filed the suits on behalf of four different pension funds and a couple of individual shareholders. (Here, by way of example, are the complaints against Danaher and Priceline; and here’s a post on the suits by Eckert Seamans partner Francis Pileggi, who first reported the filings at the Delaware Corporate & Commercial Litigation Blog.)

The corporate trend toward exclusive venue provisions for shareholder litigation dates back to a 2010 lecture by Stanford Law School professor Joseph Grundfest, who proposed that corporations enact such restrictions to curb the burgeoning problem of multijurisdictional M&A shareholder litigation. (Steven Davidoff of DealBook had a terrific analysis of Grundfest’s idea.)

The megabillion-dollar game of chicken between Bank of America and the bond insurer MBIA just got even more perilous. On Monday MBIA filed a notice that it is cross-appealing the ruling by Manhattan State Supreme Court Justice Eileen Bransten. MBIA wants reconsideration of Bransten’s finding that the bond insurer is not entitled to summary judgment on its claims that Countrywide breached representations and warranties on the mortgage-backed securities MBIA agreed to insure. You might think MBIA’s decision to appeal is a surprise, given the many routes to recovery Bransten gave MBIA on its insurance fraud claims against Countrywide. But as always in the incredibly complex litigation between Bank of America and MBIA, there are many layers to every move by either side.

Bransten’s rulings were undoubtedly a boon for the monolines Syncora and MBIA. The judge said the bond insurers don’t have to establish a direct causal link between the alleged deficiencies in the mortgage loans underlying the securities they agreed to insure and the subsequent payouts the insurers had to make on those MBS policies. Under Bransten’s opinion, MBIA and Syncora can prove insurance fraud merely by establishing that they relied on Countrywide’s alleged misrepresentations when they agreed to write the policies at issue in the litigation. And to prove a breach of the insurance agreements, they need only prove that Countrywide materially misrepresented the risk profile of the underlying mortgage pools.

Nevertheless, two days after Bransten issued her opinion, Syncora’s lawyers at Debevoise & Plimpton filed a notice of appeal. That’s because the decision wasn’t all good news for the monolines: Bransten denied Syncora and MBIA summary judgment on their interpretation of the MBS contracts they signed with Countrywide. The monolines argued that Countrywide was required to buy back every underlying mortgage that didn’t live up to the representations and warranties the issuer made about the mortgage pool. Bransten, however, said the contract language was too ambiguous for the issue to be decided on summary judgment. Syncora said it was seeking a reversal of that part of the ruling.

After New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman filed his new complaint against JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and the Mortgage Electronic Registry System, I got an email from the AG’s spokesman. “Looking forward to your story on the MERS lawsuit in the wake of your inaccurate conjecture this week,” it said, referring to my column expressing skepticism that the recently-announced joint mortgage-backed securities task force will accomplish more than the individual task force members have.

As I said in that piece, I’m eager for my skepticism to be proved unfounded. I hope the task force tells the world exactly who is responsible for the greed-driven securitization deficiencies already alleged in private MBS suits and in Congressional reports. I hope someone comes up with a legal theory to hold wrongdoers accountable for packaging mortgages that never should have been issued into securities that were (allegedly) not what they were represented to be.

That, however, is not what the AG’s new case does.

The suit, filed Friday in New York State Supreme Court in Brooklyn, asserts that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems — the privately-held organization established in the 1995 to streamline the securitization process by centralizing mortgage-transfer records — was essentially a sham operation that swindled localities out of $2 billion in mortgage-transfer fees and improperly foreclosed on homeowners whose mortgages it didn’t actually own. The AG’s office alleges that MERS and the defendant banks, all members of the MERS system, have foreclosed on hundreds of homes to which MERS was nominally the mortgage assignee, even though such foreclosures were “faulty and deceptive in several respects.” (The alleged deficiencies include MERS’s lack of standing to bring foreclosure actions; MERS’s misrepresentation of its foreclosure rights to homeowners and judges; and the mortgage registry’s submission of robosigned affidavits to courts in foreclosure cases.) Moreover, according to the complaint, MERS’s deeply flawed, private database hid mortgage transfers from courts and homeowners who needed to track them down.

None of the firms battling Countrywide and Bank of America on behalf of mortgage-backed securities investors has dedicated more resources to the fight than Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. Quinn represents some of the biggest MBS claimants in suits against Countrywide, including AIG and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The firm also represents MBIA in the bond insurer’s long-running New York State case against Countrywide. If anyone on the plaintiffs’ side has the goods on Countrywide and Bank of America, in other words, it’s Quinn Emanuel.

That’s why a ruling Thursday by U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer of Los Angeles federal court is such a blow to Countrywide MBS investors. Pfaelzer, who’s overseeing the consolidated federal-court MBS litigation against Countrywide, dismissed Allstate’s successor-liability and fraudulent-conveyance claims against Bank of America, with prejudice. Quinn represents Allstate, and offered detailed allegations that Bank of America’s 2008 acquisition of Countrywide was structured to deliver Countrywide’s revenue-producing businesses to BofA while simultaneously walling off the mortgage company’s looming liability for subprime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities.

Pfaelzer said, however, that Quinn Emanuel hadn’t come up with sufficient facts to back its assertions. She rejected two different theories: first, that Bank of America and Countrywide engaged in a fraudulent conveyance or transfer; and second, that BofA’s acquisition of Countrywide was a de facto merger. The judge has previously found for Bank of America in two other rulings on the de facto merger question (here’s Pfaelzer’s April 2011 opinion in an MBS class action against Countrywide), but this is the first time she’s delivered a definitive ruling on fraudulent-conveyance allegations.

Buried on page 93 of Facebook’s Securities and Exchange Commission registration for its $5 billion initial public offering is a very interesting disclosure.

“The Enforcement Division of the Securities and Exchange Commission has been conducting an inquiry into secondary transactions involving the sale of private company securities as well as the number of our stockholders of record,” the disclosure said. “In connection with this inquiry, we have received both formal and informal requests for information from the staff of the SEC and we have been fully cooperating with the staff. We have provided all information requested and there are no requests for documents or information that remain outstanding. We believe that we have been in compliance with the provisions of the federal securities laws relating to these matters.”

The fact of that paragraph alone is news. The New York Times reported in Dec. 2010 that the SEC was looking into the red-hot secondary market for trading in the privately-held shares of Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn, Twitter, and some other Internet darlings. The leading market-maker for such trading, SecondMarket, confirmed last January that it had received a voluntary request for information from the SEC (which has never confirmed the investigation). But Facebook is the first company to offer any hard facts about what the agency is probing.

On Tuesday, administrative law judge Theodore Essex of the U.S. International Trade Commission dealt a blow to Barnes & Noble. As the bookseller heads into trial next week on Microsoft’s claim that its e-readers infringe four Microsoft patents, Essex dismissed Barnes & Noble’s patent-misuse defense. B&N, you’ll recall, has waged an aggressive antitrust campaign against Microsoft, claiming that Microsoft is attempting to squelch the Android operating system by improperly asserting its patents. But next week’s trial won’t consider whatever evidence Barnes & Noble’s antitrust lawyers — at Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Boies, Schiller & Flexner — have amassed. The ALJ will determine only the validity of Microsoft’s patents and whether Barnes & Noble infringes them.

Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents, who was the first to report on Essex’s patent-misuse ruling, interpreted the dismissal as a broad repudiation of Barnes & Noble’s antitrust case against Microsoft. I’m not so sure about that — and my understanding is that when the ITC case is over, the bookseller can and will fire up its patent-misuse claims in the parallel Seattle federal court litigation between Barnes & Noble and Microsoft.

The ITC docket is a journalist’s nightmare. Just about every substantive document is confidential, including Microsoft’s brief on patent misuse, the ITC staff’s recommendation on the B&N defense, and Essex’s ruling, so we don’t know for sure why Essex ruled the way he did. But there’s guidance in the leading en banc decision on patent misuse by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In its August 2010 opinion in Princo Corporation v. International Trade Commission, the Federal Circuit held that the ITC should construe patent-misuse defenses narrowly, looking only at the patent-holder’s assertion of the patents at issue in the underlying infringement case.

When Michael Madigan of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe delivered a closing statement two weeks ago in the criminal trial of his client Greg Godsey, he told the federal jury in Washington, D.C., that the government had “danced with the devil.” In 2007, Madigan said, the Justice Department set up a “little nest out in Manassas, Virginia,” with the express intention of putting together Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases. But when the FBI first tried to use an informant who appeared right after the Manassas base was established, it couldn’t make out any traditional cases based on his evidence. So according to Madigan, the Justice Department instead engineered a 2009 sting involving alleged bribes to the defense minister of Gabon in exchange for military supply contracts. That operation netted Justice 22 FCPA defendants and countless headlines touting its get-tough policy on foreign corruption.

On Monday, two of the Gabon sting defendants — including Madigan’s client — were acquitted by the jury. (Jurors said they were deadlocked on charges against three other defendants, but U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ordered them to keep deliberating.) Monday’s repudiation of the Justice Department’s case came a month after Leon entered an acquittal for a sixth defendant in the Gabon sting case, and two weeks after a federal judge in Texas dismissed an FCPA case against a former employee of an ABB Group subsidiary, who was accused of bribing a Mexican official. The Texas judge wouldn’t even let the government’s case go to a jury. The four recent acquittals extend a string of setbacks for the Justice Department in FCPA prosecutions, including a July mistrial in a previous Gabon sting trial against four different defendants, as well as the December dismissal of the Department’s case against Lindsey Manufacturing on prosecutorial misconduct grounds.

Lawyers for two of the acquitted Gabon sting defendants told me Tuesday that those results are no coincidence. “I think [prosecutors] got caught up in the klieg lights,” said Madigan of Orrick. “They were blinded with the idea of getting to the goal, and they ignored the means.” Stephen Bronis of Carlton Fields, who represented attorney Stephen Giordanella on the FCPA conspiracy charges Leon tossed earlier this month, said, “I do think this is somewhat systemic …. Juries and judges are troubled by this kind of use of federal resources.” Both Madigan and Bronis told me prosecutors may be overreaching to charge FCPA violations when they don’t have sufficient evidence. (Eric Dubelier of Reed Smith, who represents acquitted Gabon sting defendant R. Patrick Caldwell, declined comment.)

In last week’s rejection of Chevron’s attempt to use U.S. courts to block enforcement of the Lago Agrio plaintiffs’ $18 billion Ecuadorean judgment, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was clearly uneasy at the idea of American judges interfering with foreign jurisprudence. So far, the arbitration panel overseeing Chevron’s case against the Republic of Ecuador has had no such qualms. But with Chevron now relying heavily on the arbitration process to protect it from plaintiffs’ attempts to claim oil company assets, the panel’s power over foreign courts is going to become a key issue — and the Ecuadorean plaintiffs are now calling for the U.S. government to support Ecuador’s sovereignty. Chevron, meanwhile, argues that if anyone has caused harm to Ecuador’s constitution, it’s the Republic and the Lago Agrio plaintiffs, not Chevron and the arbitration panel.

The three-person arbitration panel, appointed under the terms of a bilateral investment treaty between the United States and Ecuador, is presiding over Chevron’s claim that the Republic of Ecuador is liable for any judgment in the Lago Agrio litigation. (The argument is two-fold: Chevron asserts that it has been denied due process, in violation of the investment treaty, and that the Republic signed an indemnification agreement years ago with its predecessor, Texaco.) The arbitrators don’t have jurisdiction over the individual Ecuadoreans suing Chevron, but they do have power over the Republic. Last spring, following U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan‘s imposition of a worldwide injunction barring enforcement of the Ecuadorean trial court’s judgment against Chevron, the arbitration panel issued an interim order instructing the Republic to “take all measures at its disposal to suspend or cause to be suspended the enforcement or recognition within and without Ecuador of any judgment against in the Lago Agrio case.”

This month, after an intermediate appeals court in Ecuador affirmed the $18 billion judgment, Chevron went back to the BIT arbitration panel to request emergency relief. Among other things, Chevron asked for a finding that the Republic has not complied with the panel’s interim order. Last week, the arbitrators converted their interim order into a interim award, which Chevron believes will be a big help in its attempts to persuade courts around the world not to permit the Ecuadoreans to take control of Chevron assets. In early February, the panel will hear evidence on Chevron’s allegation that the Republic is helping the Lago Agrio plaintiffs.

I follow mortgage-backed securities litigation closely enough to be disgusted at the greed that fueled the securitization of insufficiently underwritten mortgages issued to homeowners who had no hope of paying them off. Sure, MBS investors and the bond insurers that backed MBS trusts were sophisticated and, to some extent, forewarned about the timebombs lurking in those mortgage pools. But you can’t read the voluminous MBS filings by monolines and investors — including the federal agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — without wishing that someone be held accountable for sending the housing market on a slide, and dragging down the rest of the economy with it.

To date, accountability has been an elusive goal. I’m not talking about private suits or breach-of-contract put-back claims, in which MBS issuers are beginning to acknowledge billions of dollars of exposure to investors and insurers. But state and federal regulators and prosecutors have lagged behind the private plaintiffs bar (and the Federal Housing Finance Agency). As best I can tell, there have been no criminal prosecutions of people or institutions involved in mortgage-backed securitizations. On the civil side, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, brought an MBS-based suit against Deutsche Bank last May. This summer, the New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, filed Martin Act claims against Bank of New York Mellon for its conduct as Countrywide MBS securitization trustee. In October, the Delaware AG, Joseph Biden III, filed a civil suit against the Mortgage Electronic Registry System that accuses the banks that established MERS of using it as a vehicle to bundle mortgages they didn’t actually own. And last week, the Illinois AG, Lisa Madigan, sued Standard & Poor‘s for giving undeserved AAA ratings to overly risky mortgage-backed notes.

Those, however, are the only major government cases stemming from mortgage-backed securitizations that I’m aware of. For well over a year, the MBS industry has been under intense scrutiny by government investigators, from (among others) Congress, the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the N.Y., Delaware, and Massachusetts AGs’ offices. So far, we haven’t seen a lot of tangible results from those investigations.

If Chevron was still hoping for a ruling from New York’s federal courts that would make it impossible for Ecuadorean plaintiffs to collect their $18 billion judgment against the oil company, Thursday’s long-awaited opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit puts an end to that strategy. The appellate panel’s 30-page opinion — which explains the court’s Sept. 2011 order lifting the worldwide injunction barring enforcement of the Ecuadorean judgment — gives Chevron the chance to argue once again that the Ecuadoreans can’t collect in New York, under the state’s Uniform Foreign Country Money-Judgments Recognition Act. But in no uncertain terms, the Second Circuit advised that even if Chevron eventually persuades a New York judge that the Ecuadoreans procured their judgment through fraud, that judge cannot bar enforcement of the judgment outside of the United States.

“Nothing in the New York statute, or in any precedent interpreting it, authorizes a court to enjoin parties holding a judgment issued in one foreign country from attempting to enforce that judgment in yet another foreign country,” wrote Second Circuit Judge Gerald Lynch, for a panel that included Judges Rosemary Pooler and Richard Wesley. “The court presuming to issue such an injunction sets itself up as the definitive international arbiter of the fairness and integrity of the world’s legal systems.”

The appellate panel’s ruling is based on what it said was Chevron’s inappropriate attempt to use New York’s Judgment Recognition Act to bar enforcement of a judgment that wasn’t even final at the time Chevron brought its case. The opinion explains that the New York statute is intended to be invoked only after the holder of a judgment attempts to enforce it inside the state’s borders. Chevron tried to get around that issue by asking for the injunction via a declaratory judgment action, in which it alleged that the Ecuadoreans procured their $18 billion verdict through fraud and political machinations. But the Second Circuit said Chevron’s interpretation of the Recognition Act, and U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan‘s endorsement of that interpretation, was “a legal misapprehension.” The act may only be used defensively, the panel said, not prospectively. For good measure, the Second Circuit also dismissed Chevron’s declaratory judgment suit.