Securities Litigation

This week, the Supreme Court held that knowing distributors of another’s false statements still could be primarily liable under parts of Rule 10b-5, even though they didn’t “make” the statements under prior precedent.  The Lorenzo decision seems clear and common-sense on its face, but represents a battle in the weeds of an administrative case that’s likely to have significant ramifications over who private civil litigants can sue under the Securities Laws.

Rule 10b-5 prohibits any person from:

• "employ[ing] any device, scheme or artifice to defraud" [Scheme]
• "mak[ing ...