Hannah Ross

Weeks From Trial

The Bank of America case was the crisis-era litigation that nearly reached a jury. Public retirement systems and other asset owners alleged that investors voted on the acquisition of Merrill Lynch without material information: Merrill’s mounting fourth-quarter losses, and Bank of America’s authorization for Merrill to pay up to $5.8 billion in discretionary bonuses while those undisclosed losses accumulated.

Ross helped lead the investor team through factual development, witness and document preparation, expert positions, and damages analysis. By September 2012 the parties were preparing for the courtroom. Weeks before the scheduled proceeding, they reached a $2.425 billion agreement combining a cash fund with corporate-governance reforms — the largest recovery in any litigation arising from the financial crisis. The district court granted final approval in April 2013.

Because Ross’s team had developed the facts, expert positions, and damages analysis to the edge of trial, the pension-fund plaintiffs could evaluate the settlement against the concrete alternative of proceeding to trial. Final approval then placed eligibility, allocation, review, and distribution within a court-supervised claims process.

The Crisis, Bank by Bank

Ross led investor-side work in the Washington Mutual and Wilmington Trust securities actions — two banks, two sets of lending practices, two roads to failure. Washington Mutual resolved for $216.75 million; Wilmington Trust produced a $210 million recovery. She also served as a senior member of the MF Global trial team after the brokerage’s collapse, recovering $234.3 million for investors, with earlier securities work including Nortel and Freddie Mac.

The financial crisis explained the weather, not the fraud: falsity and loss causation remained issuer-specific questions. Ross’s teams connected particular public statements and internal practices to loan operations, risk reporting, financial documents, witness testimony, and company-specific price movement rather than letting the broader downturn stand in for proof.

Wells Fargo: A Billion Dollars on Compliance

Investors alleged that Wells Fargo misrepresented its progress in complying with regulatory consent orders meant to correct the risk-management failures behind its scandals. Ross co-led the prosecution for three pension funds and asset managers, including public retirement systems and a Swedish asset manager.

The litigation lined up four records against each other: what Wells Fargo said, what the consent orders required, what later disclosures revealed, and how the market responded. After three years, the parties reached a $1 billion cash settlement, granted final approval in September 2023 — with Ross connecting the lead plaintiffs’ objectives to the compliance record, expert analysis, mediation, settlement design, allocation, and Rule 23 review that carried the case into a funded, court-supervised recovery.

Structured Alpha at the Height of the Pandemic

When the Allianz Structured Alpha funds collapsed in the market dislocation of March 2020, BLB&G filed separate actions for pension funds and other investor clients — and Ross led the team’s work for thirty-five public funds and asset owners, recovering more than $2 billion.

The case demanded new litigation strategies built at the height of the pandemic. The claims concerned representations about an options strategy, risk controls, and hedging; the work required understanding the product deeply enough to test risk reports, trace changes in hedging practice, and explain the consequences to fiduciary clients. The team coordinated fund documents, subscription decisions, risk presentations, loss histories, and client-specific negotiations. Each of the thirty-five clients kept its own funds, agreements, materials, loss history, and remedies, so the team ran a common investigation while preserving every client-specific claim. Allianz Global Investors U.S. later pleaded guilty to securities fraud, and the SEC entered an order concerning misrepresentations about downside risk — while the civil recoveries remained tied, client by client, to each investor’s own transactions and losses.

Ross’s experience counseling investors on U.S. and non-U.S. claims shaped where each claim belonged and what each asset owner had to establish.

What Fiduciaries Need

A public pension fund serving as lead plaintiff is itself a fiduciary: it reviews allegations, supervises counsel, and evaluates discovery and settlement on behalf of the class. Ross translates the litigation record into decisions those fiduciaries can actually make — whether to lead a class, remain in it, opt out, or pursue a direct claim — organizing investigation, discovery, expert work, and trial preparation around the issuer, the security, the challenged statement, the market event, the governing law, the forum, purchase records, and the claimed loss. The developed record also lets an investor client decide whether to settle, proceed, narrow, or decline a claim.

Ross is a partner and Executive Committee member at BLB&G. Her practice includes securities fraud, corporate-governance disputes, shareholder litigation, and counseling for public pension funds and other asset owners in the United States and abroad. She co-chairs the firm’s Forum for Institutional Investors and its Women’s Forum, serves the public pension community through the National Association of Public Pension Attorneys, and recently concluded a three-year term on the Council of Institutional Investors’ Markets Advisory Council. With her partner Katie Sinderson, she mentors the firm’s women litigators over lunches and dinners where hard-won lessons get passed down. She has taught trial advocacy as adjunct faculty at Penn State Dickinson Law — the school where she earned her J.D., after graduating from Cornell University.