From time to time over the past 14 months, the Litigation Daily has checked in with securities litigators to see how the global pandemic has shaped the sorts of claims showing up in class actions targeting big drops in company stock prices.

The early input we got from practitioners and the early rulings we saw from the courts made us skeptical about the staying power of COVID-related securities claims. After all, that marketwide drop in stock prices in the initial weeks of the pandemic made hard targets of most companies who took big hits. It's tough to show that a company intentionally misstated the pandemic's impact on business or that officials were caught off guard in any exceptional way when everybody was caught off guard.