Bricklayers & Trowel Trades International Pension Fund v. Credit Suisse First Boston

853 F. Supp. 2d 181, 87 Fed. R. Serv. 514, 2012 WL 118486, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 4566
CourtDistrict Court, D. Massachusetts
DecidedJanuary 13, 2012
DocketCivil Action No. 02-12146-NMG
StatusPublished
Cited by11 cases

This text of 853 F. Supp. 2d 181 (Bricklayers & Trowel Trades International Pension Fund v. Credit Suisse First Boston) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering District Court, D. Massachusetts primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Bricklayers & Trowel Trades International Pension Fund v. Credit Suisse First Boston, 853 F. Supp. 2d 181, 87 Fed. R. Serv. 514, 2012 WL 118486, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 4566 (D. Mass. 2012).

Opinion

MEMORANDUM & ORDER

GORTON, District Judge.

This case is a consolidated securities class action in which the court-appointed lead plaintiff, the Bricklayers and Trowel Trades International Pension Fund, asserts claims on behalf of the class of individuals (“plaintiffs”) who purchased common stock of AOL-Time Warner, Inc. (“AOL”) from January 12, 2001, through July 24, 2002 (“the Class Period”). The defendants include Credit Suisse First Boston (USA), Inc. (“CSFB-USA”), Credit Suisse First Boston, LLC (“CSFB”), its wholly-owned subsidiary, and four individuals who were employed by CSFB during all or part of the Class Period (collectively, “defendants”). The individual defendants include James Kiggen and Laura Martin, former CSFB research analysts responsible for investment research coverage of AOL during the Class Period. Kiggen and Martin reported to defendants Frank Quattrone, the former Senior Managing Director and Global Head of CSFB’s Technology Group, and Elliot Rogers, the former Managing Director and Global Director of Technology Research.

I. The Complaint

The Second Amended Consolidated Class Action Complaint (“the complaint”) asserts two counts: 1) CSFB, Kiggen and Martin made material misstatements and omissions in violation of section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act (“Exchange Act”), 15 U.S.C. § 78j(b), and Rule 10b-5(b) promulgated thereunder, 17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5 (“Count I”), and 2) CSFBUSA, CSFB, Quattrone and Rogers acted as “control persons” in violation of section 20(a) of the Exchange Act, 15 U.S.C. § 78t(a) (“Count II”).

To prove allegations of securities fraud under Rule 10b-5, a plaintiff must establish:

1) that the defendants made a material misrepresentation in connection with the purchase or sale of a security;
2) that the misrepresentation was made with scienter;
3) reliance, i.e., but for the misrepresentation, an investor would not have purchased or sold the security;
4) economic loss, i.e., the investor lost money as the result of said purchase or sale; and
5) loss causation, i.e., a causal connection between the misrepresentation and the economic loss.

[185]*185In re PolyMedica Corp. Sec. Litig., 432 F.3d 1, 6-7 (1st Cir.2005).

Plaintiffs’ theory of recovery in this case is commonly referred to as the fraud-on-the-market scenario. Plaintiffs allege, under that theory, that 1) CSFB’s overly optimistic and intentionally misleading reports, upon which class investors relied in purchasing the AOL stock, artificially inflated the stock price and 2) after the market learned of the deception, the price of the stock declined.

II. Procedural history

In 2003, various cases were consolidated to comprise this action. In September, 2006, former United States District Judge Nancy Gertner denied defendants’ motions to dismiss and, two years later, certified the class. Most recently, on August 26, 2011, 2011 WL 3813204, Judge Gertner provisionally denied defendants’ motions for summary judgment without ruling on defendants’ objection to the testimony of plaintiffs’ expert Dr. Scott Hakala. On that occasion she stated:

Summary judgment — without a full Daubert hearing — is an inappropriate way to decide [whether Dr. Hakala’s event study and testimony will be admitted at trial.]. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharm., Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993). The expert issues cannot be determined by precedent, pointing out that Plaintiffs’ expert was accepted or rejected in this or that case so long as the Defendants are making, in effect, an as-applied challenge on these facts, in this context. It requires more than warring affidavits and strident briefs. It requires an evidentiary hearing. And in the hearing the threshold question is not just the reliability of the expert testimony under the Federal Rules of Evidence 702. It is also whether a jury would fully understand the attacks and counterattacks as they play out in the instant case.

Judge Gertner pointed out that reliance and loss causation, two central elements of plaintiffs’ securities fraud case, “necessarily rely on [the] expert testimony” of Dr. Hakala, implying that if the Court were to exclude the testimony of Dr. Hakala after a Daubert hearing, it would necessarily have to revisit its summary judgment decision.

Upon Judge Gertner’s retirement from the bench, the case was transferred to this Session. Pending before the Court are defendants’ motion to preclude the expert opinions of Scott Hakala, M. Laurentius Marais, Bernard Black and Reinier Kraakman, which plaintiffs oppose, and plaintiffs’ motion to preclude the expert opinions of Rene Stulz and John Deighton, which defendants oppose. On December 20, 2011, the Court convened a Daubert hearing at which Dr. Hakala and Dr. Marais testified and counsel were afforded ah opportunity to expound at length on their respective motions. The Court took the motions under advisement and, upon further reflection and analysis, renders the following decision.

III. Defendants’ motion to preclude the expert opinion of Dr. Scott Hakala

Dr. Hakala prepared an event study to measure the impact, if any, of defendants’ allegedly fraudulent statements and omissions on the value of AOL stock during the Class Period.

A. Event studies

A conventional securities fraud event study is conducted as follows: an economist performs a regression to estimate the relationship between a stock’s “actual return” (the difference between closing prices on two consecutive days) and the movement of one or more indices repre[186]*186senting an average of the stock prices for several companies which make up the market and/or industries in which the firm operates. This first step allows the economist to predict how the stock price should move on any given day based on the movement of the indices (“the expected return”) and thereby provides a benchmark for all companies within a particular market. The estimated expected return is then used as the baseline against which the stock’s actual return on pre-selected event days is measured. The expected return is thus a measured expectation of what the normal stock price movement would have been if the event had not occurred. If the difference between the expected return and the actual return on an event day is statistically significant, it may be attributed to the event occurring on that day, provided that the study controls for confounding factors. A. Craig MacKinlay, Event Studies in Economics and Finance. 35 J. Econ. .Literature 13, 13-35 (1997); Jay W. Eisenhofer, Geoffrey C. Jarvis & James R. Banko,

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853 F. Supp. 2d 181, 87 Fed. R. Serv. 514, 2012 WL 118486, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 4566, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/bricklayers-trowel-trades-international-pension-fund-v-credit-suisse-mad-2012.