The jury’s still out on whether litigation will boom in this recession, as conventional wisdom predicts. (This past fall, our annual litigation supplement concluded that the early signs weren’t promising ["Don't Count on It," Litigation 2009].) But there’s one undeniable hot spot of litigation activity: the slew of common law fraud suits over structured financial products that turned out to be toxic waste. Banks are getting sued for billions on both sides of the Atlantic—and much of the time, the plaintiffs are other financial institutions.
This spike in bank-on-bank litigation is something new, as senior international correspondent Michael D. Goldhaber reports in our cover story. And one Am Law 200 firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges—which conveniently lacks a transactional department and the conflicts it might bring—has taken the lead in suing banks. A look at Quinn Emanuel’s docket shows the current state of play in the complex, high-stakes litigation over the fallout from last year’s financial meltdown. Goldhaber’s article, “The Credit Crunch After-Party,” begins here.
