Head Office Address:
One Liberty Square
Boston, MA 02109
United States
Managing Partner: Nicole Lavallee
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Managing Partner: Kathleen Donovan-Maher
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Number of partners: 15
Number of attorneys: 33
Languages: Arabic, English, Farsi, French, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian
Founded in 1982, Berman Tabacco is a national law firm with offices in California and Massachusetts. The firm has devoted its practice to complex litigation, primarily under the securities and antitrust laws, as well as related services requested by and provided to its institutional clients. The firm also has an active whistleblower practice, among others.
Securities Litigation: Berman Tabacco has over 40 years of securities-litigation experience and has represented public pension funds and other institutional investors in that area since 1998. The firm has prosecuted some of the largest securities cases and has recovered billions of dollars on behalf of investors. Indeed, Berman Tabacco appears as one of the firms with the most settlements on the list of the top 100 largest securities class actions in ISS Securities Class Action Services’ published report, Top 100 U.S. Class Action Settlements of All Time (as of 12/31/2022). The firm has successfully prosecuted and recovered billions of dollars for defrauded investors in some of the most significant shareholder lawsuits of the last 20 years, having been appointed as lead or co-lead counsel in more than 100 actions. Selected successes include:
Berman Tabacco’s dismissal rate for cases brought under the federal securities laws is less than half the overall dismissal rate for such cases (based on the reported dismissal rate by one authoritative study. Securities Class Action Filings: 2022 Year in Review, pp. 22, 34 (Cornerstone Research 2023). The firm serves as monitoring, evaluation, and/or litigation counsel for over 100 institutional investors, which includes 17 statewide public employee retirement systems with more than $50 billion in assets.
Antitrust Litigation: Berman Tabacco’s antitrust practice also has a national reputation for prosecuting class actions that involve anticompetitive conduct and conspiracies to fix or maintain prices. Over the years, the firm has played a major role in the prosecution of numerous landmark antitrust cases and has been at the forefront of some of the largest antitrust settlements—recovering over a billion dollars for class members and changing business practices of defendant companies. The following are examples of the antitrust group’s efforts:
Whistleblower Representation: Berman Tabacco’s whistleblower practice group assists individuals wishing to expose fraud perpetrated against the federal government, states, and corporations, working to obtain the compensation and protections afforded by the False Claims Act, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Whistleblower Program, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission Whistleblower Program, and the Internal Revenue Service Whistleblower Program. Berman Tabacco helps whistleblowers engage appropriate government entities to right wrongs—enforced either by those agencies or through separate litigation. In April 2021, the SEC awarded over $50 million to joint whistleblowers represented by the firm. It was the second largest whistleblower award by the SEC when it was made.
Updated Aug 2023