The Securities Class Action Clearinghouse (SCAC) provides detailed information relating to the prosecution, defense, and settlement of federal class action securities fraud litigation.
The SCAC team maintains a Filings database of more than 4,000 securities class action lawsuits filed since passage of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The database also contains copies of more than 45,000 complaints, briefs, filings, and other litigation-related materials filed in these cases.
In 2002 Joseph A. Grundfest, founder and Principal Investigator of the SCAC wrote:
"The Stanford Clearinghouse offers information that is substantially more detailed and timely than can be found on other services, which generally limit their databases to judicial decisions. By accessing this site, each user can form his or her own opinion as to whether litigation is with or without merit, whether too few or too many companies are being sued, and whether recoveries are too small or too large."
The SCAC offers regular updates identifying companies that have recently been named as defendants in federal class action securities fraud complaints. Institutional investors with more than $1.5 trillion in assets under management are registered with the SCAC to receive automatic notices of litigation developments that may affect investments in their portfolios. All members of the public are invited to register to receive prompt notification of litigation developments. If you would like to receive this information, please register here.
We have concentrated our resources on the data gathering methodologies.
Leslie A. Gordon (MA í98), in an article in the Stanford Lawyer Magazine, said in 2010:
"Empirical research is not without challenges or flaws. Despite sophisticated statistical methods, the resulting inferences are only as good as the data on which researchers rely."
Our team faces these challenges by concentrating our resources to improve and optimize the data gathering methodologies. We are constantly reviewing our documentation to refine our research methods and find new ways to cross check and cross reference the data.
Our researchers gather filings from the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) and extract and analyze thousands of complaints, filings, and many other litigation-related publications. The data collection procedures also include information that is extracted from documents filed in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other academic resources.
We track securities class actions filed in Federal Court after the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 came into effect. Therefore, our population of records consist of securities class action lawsuits filed after 1995.
We do not track lawsuits filed in state court where there is no parallel federal civil class action, nor do we track SEC enforcement proceedings when there is no parallel federal civil class action.
Often in a securities class action issuers, underwriters, investment banks, broker firms, mutual funds, or a combination of these, will be sued in multiple filings, filed by different named plaintiffs represented by different plaintiffs' law firms. While these filings often contain substantially similar allegations, there may be variations between the allegations or defendants in separate complaints, which are generally consolidated or managed together.
We take the challenge of compiling into a single Filing all those multiple filings long before the courts consolidate, or manage jointly, those filings as a single procedure.
An unique record or filing in our database consists of one or more securities class action complaints with the same underlying allegations filed against the same defendant, or defendants. Accordingly, when a case arises out of the same subject matter as one of the actions first filed and is brought by shareholders of the same issuer, or issuers, it is hereafter part of that record or filing.
The defendant may or may not be the issuer of the plaintiff's securities. They may be underwriters, investment banks, broker firms, mutual funds, etc.
For example, the “Mutual Fund” cases filed between 2003 and 2004 that alleged violation of the securities law in connection with the practice of timing and late trading, were suits that generally did not allege that the issuers engaged in any unlawful activity, but the Mutual Funds trading the securities in question. (Note, the cases where the issuer is not named as a defendant does not represent the large majority of lawsuits in the database.)
In addition, a record (case) in our database generally describes only one complaint of all the filings against the same defendant. As a general rule, we select the first complaint we have identified. If multiple complaints are filed at one time, we choose the complaint that appeared to contain the most detailed allegations. However, if we locate the amended and/or consolidated complaint, we update the case summary and other information as needed.
The problem with certain PDF documents on our Website, unfortunately, comes directly from the law firms providing us with the complaints. Some of these PDF documents are encrypted. When a PDF document is encrypted you are unable to do anything but what the author allows the user to do. One of the most common encryptions is not allowing the user to print the document. We apologize since we are unable to do anything about those specially encrypted documents.
If you require a hard copy of a filing with a encrypted PDF document, you will need to contact the court where the complaint was filed or the firm who filed the complaint. The court will most definitely charge a fee. Some firms do charge and some don't.
It covers all securities class actions filed in Federal Court after the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 came into effect. Therefore, our population of records consist of securities class action lawsuits filed after 1995.
The Filings database is updated each business day. The News section is updated two or three times per week. The Academic Articles section is updated as soon as the papers are available for publishing. The Litigation Activity Indices and the Clearinghouse Reports which are led by Cornerstone Research’s team are biannual and annual publications.
We generally send out e-mail notification once a week concerning all cases which have been filed since the previous notice.
After a lawsuit is filed, we generally post the complaint in the same day, or within three days when the complaint is not available in electronic format. A delay of up to seven days may occur because all court documents are processed so that they can be text searchable.
We do not have any current plans to expand the site to cover different types (i.e. non-securities) of class actions or other types of litigation. However, our group at the Stanford Law School and the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance is in the process of completing other databases and making them available to the public. For further inquiries, please contact Nancy Easterbrook from our office of Corporate & Foundation Relations at neasterb@law.stanford.edu
While most documents that are posted on the site are able to be downloaded and printed for free, we do not have the resources to mail or fax paper copies of documents to individuals. Notice the some documents posted in the site are encrypted. When a file (document) is encrypted you are unable to do anything but what the author of that document allows you to do. For this reason, you are in most cases able to view the document only. (Please read: I am unable to print and/or download PDF court documents. What is happening?)
No. While we will answer general questions about the Securities Class Clearinghouse itself, we are not able to answer questions which require giving legal advice.
No. We do not modify the text of documents before posting them to the site. An error in the original document will also appear on the posted document. Prior to 2000, when we had to create HTML versions of the court documents, an error in the document appeared with a "[sic]" symbol behind it. We did sometimes modify the spacing or layout of a document, but not the content.
A securities class action is a case brought pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 on behalf of a group of persons who purchased the securities of a particular company during a specified period of time (the class period). The complaint generally contains allegations that the company and/or certain of its officers and directors violated one or more of the federal or state securities laws. A suit is filed as a class action because the members of the class are so numerous that joinder of all members is impracticable. For a case to proceed as a class action, there should be a well-defined commonality of interest in the questions of law and fact involved in the case. Further, the plaintiffs must establish that a class action is superior to other available methods for the fair and efficient adjudication of the controversy and that the prosecution of separate actions by individual class members would create a risk of inconsistent and varying adjudications.
The Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 are the main federal laws which prohibit such conduct. The text of these statutes is available at Securities Lawyer's Deskbook run by the University of Cincinnati College of Law. The URL is: http://taft.law.uc.edu/CCL/index.html. In addition, the states have securities laws, known as blue sky laws, which are also designed to protect individual investors.
A section of this website is devoted to securities-related Academic Articles, including written testimonies, and securities class actions lawsuits analysis and statistical reports (Clearinghouse Reports). The URL addresses are: http://securities.stanford.edu/academic_articles.html and http://securities.stanford.edu/clearinghouse_research.html.
The data cannot be automatically downloaded -in Excel format for example. However, you should feel free to use the data that you can obtain from this website for academic research purpose. You are not allowed to commercialize or make public the data of this website in your own website, publish on any other media outlet or distribute.
This project is made possible only through the vision and generosity of Cornerstone Research and the Arthur and Toni Rembe Rock Center for Corporate Governance.
Cornerstone Research provides valuable financial and analytic support for this website.
The Rock Center for Corporate Governance provides financial and management support.
Register to receive weekly-email notification of recent filings and news
Please register to receive e-mail notification from the Securities Class Action Clearinghouse. You will receive a weekly-email of the list of recent filings every Monday, and a weekly email of news of securities class action litigation every Friday.
If you have any questions regarding registration, please send an email to scac@law.stanford.edu.
Click on the button below to register.
Stanford Law School
Press inquiries or for information about the content and functionality on this site, please contact scac@law.stanford.edu.
Cornerstone Research
For press inquiries about Cornerstone Research, please contact Susan Wittner at swittner@cornerstone.com. For information about Cornerstone Research materials on this site, including securities class action filings, settlements, and litigation activity indices, please contact securities_class_action_research@cornerstone.com.
Disclaimer of Liability
The information included on this web site, whether provided by personnel employed by Stanford University or by third parties, is provided for research and teaching purposes only. Neither Stanford University, nor any of their employees, agents, contractors, or affiliates warrant the accuracy or completeness of the information or analyses displayed herein, and we caution all readers that inclusion of any information on this site does not constitute an endorsement of the truthfulness or accuracy of that information. In particular, this web site contains complaints and other documents filed in federal courts, which make allegations that may or may not be accurate. No reader should, on the basis of information contained in or referenced by this web site, assume that any of these allegations are truthful.
Copyright © 2014 The Leland Stanford Junior University (Stanford University). All Rights Reserved. The information and graphics contained in this web site are copyrighted and may not be distributed, modified, reproduced in whole or in part without the prior written permission of Stanford University. Copyright is not claimed as to any part of the original work prepared by Cornerstone Research, specifically the material found in the Litigation Activity Indices and Clearinghouse Research sections of this website. Cornerstone Research claims Copyright of those materials. Copyright is not claimed as to any part of the complaints, briefs, filings, and other litigation-related materials filed in the Courts.