After 13 years of litigation, Goldman Sachs has definitively brought to a close an attempted securities-fraud class action lawsuit concerning its ABACUS collateralized debt obligation that garnered international news headlines. On November 17, Judge Paul Crotty of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York entered the voluntary dismissal with prejudice of the litigation against Goldman Sachs and its former CEO Lloyd Blankfein, COO Gary Cohn and CFO David Viniar.
The S&C team was recognized by Law360 as “Legal Lions” for this result. S&C’s Robert Giuffra Jr. received “Litigator of the Week” honors from The American Lawyer’s Litigation Daily for a ruling this August from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that decertified the class.
Over the lengthy history of the case, the district court certified a class three times and, each time, Goldman Sachs obtained discretionary review by the Second Circuit of the class-certification orders, the most times this has occurred in any securities class action. In 2021, the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which in an 8-1 decision agreed with Goldman Sachs and vacated the Second Circuit’s affirmance of the district court’s second class-certification order. When the district court then certified a class once more, the Second Circuit accepted discretionary review and reversed the certification order in August. In addition to setting critical precedents for class certification in securities actions, over the course of the litigation, the case proceeded through extensive motion practice, discovery, experts and summary judgment briefing.
The S&C team included Robert Giuffra Jr., David Rein, Richard Klapper, Benjamin Walker, Julia Malkina, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Cohen, Eric Andrews, Albert Kwan, Michael Lemanski, Albert Kwan, Krystal Valentin, Miles Greene and Esther Loh.