Securities Group Of The Year: Robbins Geller

by Jessica Corso
Law360
Article is reprinted with permission from Law360.

Law360 (February 17, 2026, 4:00 PM EST) -- Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP secured one of the largest shareholder class settlements of all time in a deal with Under Armour Inc. and has defeated multiple attempts by Disney to fend off a lawsuit filed by its investors, making the firm one of the 2025 Law360 Securities Groups of the Year.

The firm is leading a case accusing Disney of misleading investors about customer interest in its streaming service, Disney+, leading to a 55% stock price decline when it was discovered that its subscriber target “was a fiction.”

Robbins Geller, led by partner Daniel Drosman, was able to avert two attempts by Disney to dismiss the case in the lower court, as well as a move by the company to plead for the Ninth Circuit’s intervention.

The firm also got U.S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall to reinstate Disney CEO Bob Iger as a defendant in August, three months after the judge initially threw out the claims against Iger.

“So now we have an intact fraud case for Disney with all defendants and all allegations, and we’re working to prepare this case for trial and discovery,” Drosman said.

The 200-lawyer firm claims to have successfully tried more shareholder class actions than any other firm since the federal securities laws were modernized in 1995 under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act.

Drosman, who also sits on Robbins Geller’s management committee, said the firm’s willingness to take cases to trial is “the single biggest driver” of the large settlements it has been able to land.

“Defendants know we’re not going to bluff,” he said. “We’d much rather take the risk of a trial to force a big final recovery than taking an earlier, smaller exit.”

That strategy was successful in January 2025, when the firm won a mid-trial, $126.3 million settlement for Alta Mesa Resources Inc. investors who claimed to have been misled about the value of a 2017 merger.

It also bore fruit this past November with the firm negotiating a $179 million settlement with Acadia Healthcare on the cusp of a trial in which it hoped to prove that the company misled investors about the strength of its U.K. operations.

Echoing Drosman, Robbins Geller partner Robert Rothman told Law360 that the large recoveries in those cases were down to a strategy of treating every case as if it were going to trial from the outset.

“When we’re first retained and begin an investigation, we’re looking for witnesses who will testify at trial. We’re looking for what our story will be in front of the jury,” said Rothman, also a member of the firm’s management committee.

A third recent example of that tactic paying off came in November 2024, when a Maryland federal judge signed off on a $434 million Under Armour settlement with investors that the firm secured weeks before trial. The deal, which ended a lawsuit accusing the retailer of hiding falling demand for its products, made its way onto Institutional Shareholder Services’ top 100 securities class action settlements of all time. When ISS last issued its top 100 report in December, the Under Armour settlement took the 47th slot on the list.

That case represented not just the strength of the firm’s trial team but also its appellate practice, Drosman said.

The case had been dismissed twice in the lower court before an appeal in the Fourth Circuit revived it following news that Under Armour’s accounting practices were under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice.

The company later agreed to a $9 million settlement with the SEC, in which it neither admitted nor denied that it misled investors about its revenue growth.

“So our recovery was 48 times the result achieved by the SEC, and the second-largest securities [class action] recovery ever in the Fourth Circuit,” Drosman said.

Rothman also highlighted the importance of Robbins Geller’s five-member appellate practice in securing major settlements for clients.

“The appellate department is our backstop that enables us to do what it is that we do [and] to get the great results that we’ve been obtaining,” he said.

--Editing by Dave Trumbore.

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