Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP Obtains $388 Million Recovery in J.P. Morgan MBS Class Action
San Diego, CA (July 17, 2015) – Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP announced a $388 million recovery on behalf of a class of investors in nine 2007 residential mortgage-backed securities (MBS) offerings issued by J.P. Morgan – bringing to a successful conclusion one of the last remaining MBS purchaser class actions arising out of the global financial crisis. The settlement represents, on a percentage basis, the largest recovery ever achieved in an MBS purchaser class action.
“We’re pleased with the record-setting recovery for our participants and the class,” stated Ed Smith, Fund Manager for lead plaintiff Laborers Pension Trust Fund for Northern California. “Our lawyers at Robbins Geller were tireless in their efforts, and the result is a significant victory for the class.”
Lead plaintiffs and court-appointed class representatives Laborers Pension Trust Fund for Northern California and Construction Laborers Pension Trust for Southern California played a key role in achieving the remarkable result, said Robbins Geller partner Luke Brooks, one of the lead attorneys on the case. “We couldn’t have achieved such a stellar recovery without the leadership of the Northern and Southern California Laborers Pension Funds,” Brooks said. “These Funds not only stepped forward to protect their participants’ hard earned retirement savings, but equally important they committed themselves to the trial of this action, which allowed us to maximize the recovery for the class.”
The settlement was achieved after six years of hard-fought litigation and an extensive investigation into all facets of defendants’ securitization practices – a process that resulted in the production of more than 80 million pages of documents from defendants and third parties, over 40 witness depositions, and consultation with experts in diverse and complex fields such as mortgage re-underwriting, securitization due diligence, statistics, and economics. Robbins Geller also secured the cooperation of a critical whistleblower witness, which yielded key evidence in support of plaintiffs’ claims, and obtained a class certification order that certified the most broadly defined plaintiff class of any MBS class action to date.
The $388 million recovery stands alone as the highest percentage-of-face-value recovered in any of the 16 comparable MBS purchaser class action settlements obtained to date and is more than two-and-a-half times greater than the average percentage recovery in previous MBS purchaser class action settlements. “Ultimately, the skill of our litigation team and our willingness to take the case deep paid off with an extraordinary result for the class,” said Brooks.
The case is Fort Worth Employees’ Retirement Fund v. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 1:09-cv-03701-JPO), currently pending before U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken in Manhattan. For more information about the history of Fort Worth Employees’ Retirement Fund v. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. please contact Luke Brooks at Lukeb@rgrdlaw.com or Darryl Alvarado at Dalvarado@rgrdlaw.com.
About Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd
Robbins Geller, with 200 lawyers in ten offices, represents U.S. and international institutional investors in contingency-based securities and corporate litigation. The firm has obtained many of the largest securities class action recoveries in history and was ranked first in both the amount and number of shareholder class action recoveries in ISS’s SCAS Top 50 report for 2014. Please visit http://www.rgrdlaw.com for more information.