Securities Litigation

The US Sixth Circuit last week narrowed its standard for adequately pleading scienter in PSLRA cases using a collective-knowledge theory to impute knowledge to a corporate defendant from among various employees. In Omnicare, the Court limited collective-knowledge scienter by imposing the helpful, but unremarkable, requirement that such a pleading demonstrate a reasonably close connection between the collectively-held-knowledge and the issuance of the misstatement (or decision not to correct a prior omission). In re Omnicare, Inc. Securities Litigation, No. 13-5597 (6^th