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| 2002 News and Press Releases |
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HEADLINE ARCHIVED:
The Kings Of Pain Team Up
By: Marc Gunther
Fortune. December 9, 2002
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EXCERPT: As if CEOs and corporate directors don't have enough nightmares, consider this: America's most feared class-action lawyer and its most zealous shareholder activist just joined forces to try to make executives pay--personally--for their mistakes. The lawyer is Bill Lerach (a.k.a. the "King of Pain"). His firm, Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, represents shareholders currently suing more than 70 companies--including Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, AOL Time Warner (parent of FORTUNE's publisher), Qwest, and Sprint--over alleged violations of securities laws (for more on class-action suits, see "Should You Sue?"). The shareholder activist is Robert A.G. Monks, founder of Institutional Shareholder Services, who has lobbied for 20 years with missionary fervor to promote better corporate governance. Supporting both men are pension-fund clients such as Calpers, whose distress over losing money invested in scandal-plagued corporations is surpassed only by their wish to prevent it from happening again. Lerach and Monks are first targeting Qwest and Sprint. The pending Qwest suit accuses former executives of cashing out stock at inflated prices while misleading investors about the company's financial condition, while the Sprint suit charges executives with wrongly exercising stock options in conjunction with the aborted merger of Sprint and WorldCom. Lawyers for both companies vigorously deny the charges.
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