Wendy Berman has been quoted in the article "Slowdown in Securities," published in Lexpert's Special Edition on Litigation.
Writes Julius Melnitzer: "There was no shortage of doubters after the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) released its landmark 2015 trilogy setting the standard that plaintiffs must meet to satisfy the leave threshold for filing secondary market securities class actions.... Canadian lawyers on both sides of the Bar generally acknowledge the recent slowdown and impact of the trilogy."
Contrarily, however, there's been a revitalization of the genre in the US - in part because the US Securities and Exchange Commission governs a far larger population and is considerably more aggressive than its Canadian counterparts. Says Wendy: "That's important because class counsel can piggyback their cases on regulatory investigation and findings. In 2017, for example, the Canadian Securities Administrators took actions against only seven companies for disclosure violations."
The upshot is that securities class actions now give plaintiffs' lawyers much greater pause for thought than they did in the past. "The SCC breathed life into the idea that the plaintiffs must introduce some evidence to show that they can succeed and that the court must do a full analysis of that evidence," Wendy says. "Plaintiffs' counsel now have to invest significantly at the outset of the case in terms of marshalling factual and expert evidence."
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