Mixed opinions

摘要

A year has passed since Wall Street firms settled with Eliot Spitzer, New York state's attorney-general, and other regulators, over conflicts of interest in their equity research. Enormous sums of money are still at stake, in lawsuits brought on behalf of private investors. It seems that winning and losing may come down to which judge is assigned to each case. So far, Merrill Lynch seems to have hit the jackpot. All the litigation against it has been consolidated in New York under Milton Pollack, a federal judge who believes that there is no case to answer. Others have been less lucky: Lehman Brothers suffered a nasty setback last month when another federal judge in the same judicial district in lower Manhattan, Jed Rakoff, allowed litigation against it to proceed. These are, of course, early days; but because the stakes are so high, defendants on the end of adverse rulings are under great pressure to settle. It may well be that none of the civil cases lasts long enough to be decided by a jury.