Law Firms Rev Up for Expected Bank Litigation Barrage
A traditional taboo against suing banks among big-league United Kingdom law firms is rapidly losing its power as legal eagles there and abroad rev their engines in anticipation of a barrage of bank-related litigation.
The biggest London legal advisers to banks still won’t accept such litigation matters, either because they are contractually barred from suing banks or because they expect to do better in the long run by offering corporate legal advice to financial institutions. But a growing number of firms that aren’t conflicted out are eagerly awaiting an expected tsunami of bank litigation sparked by the subprime mortgage crisis and resulting worldwide credit crunch, reports the London Times.
Among them: “Cohen Milstein Hausfeld & Toll, one of America’s most-feared class-action law firms, caused a stir when it opened an office in London last year. It has said that it would consider bringing cases against banks here,” the Times reports. And, locally, Edwin Coe; Fox Williams; and Collyer Bristow are exploring their options in bank-related litigation, too.
Like Cohen Milstein, the Collyer firm also is looking over the fence—it is recruiting British shareholders for American class actions. Meanwhile, another well-known American firm, Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, is recruiting European pension funds as potential plaintiffs in U.S. shareholder litigation, the Times notes in an earlier article.
Steven Loble, a partner at Collyer Bristow, tells the newspaper that one source of the expected tidal wave of bank litigation is small companies forced out of business by the credit crunch. Such lawsuits, he says, are inevitable: “It’s only a matter of time, a very short time. It could be today, tomorrow, it could be next week.”
