Although two federal appeals courts have frowned on the use of competitive bidding to select lead counsel in securities class actions, the federal judge who first championed the practice in 1990 recently urged Congress to codify auctioning of lead counsel status.
Chief Judge Vaughn Walker of the Northern District of California was among the first federal judges in the country to experiment with competitive selection of class counsel as a means of saving investors money in securities cases. In re Oracle Securities Litigation, 131 F.R.D. 688 (N.D. Calif. 1990).
