Jason A. Forge

Forge argued the appeal. On June 16, 2021, a unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Sandra S. Ikuta joined by Chief Judge Sidney R. Thomas and Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen, reversed. Risk disclosures that "speak entirely of as-yet-unrealized risks and contingencies" can mislead reasonable investors when some of those risks have already come to pass, the court wrote, and Alphabet's warning in each quarterly report of risks that "could" or "may" occur "is misleading to a reasonable investor when Alphabet knew that those risks had materialized." The claims went back to the district court for discovery, class certification and expert work, and on September 30, 2024, Judge Trina L. Thompson approved a $350 million settlement for investors who had bought the stock between April 23, 2018 and April 30, 2019. Laura Andracchio, Michael Albert, J. Marco Janoski Gray, Ting Liu, Kenneth Dolitsky and Sarah Fallon worked the case with him. "This is an unprecedented recovery for a case that required the Rhode Island Treasurer to win a unanimous reversal from the Ninth Circuit," Forge said when the settlement was approved, "which confirmed that misleadingly incomplete statements can be just as deceptive as outright lies."

Thirteen Counts

Forge came to securities work from the United States Attorney's Offices in the Southern and Central Districts of California and the Eastern District of Virginia, where he led grand jury investigations and tried the cases they produced. In San Diego he was one of the prosecutors in the bribery conspiracy around Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham, who admitted taking $2.4 million from defense contractors and was sentenced to eight years and four months, and in the fall of 2007 he tried the contractor at the center of it, Brent Wilkes, before Judge Larry Alan Burns. On November 5, 2007, after a month of trial, the jury convicted Wilkes on all thirteen counts, and in February 2008 Judge Burns sentenced him to twelve years. The investigation reached into the Central Intelligence Agency, where Wilkes's boyhood friend Kyle "Dusty" Foggo had risen to Executive Director, the agency's third-ranking officer, and had steered contracts to him; the search of Foggo's office at headquarters in Langley in May 2006 was the first search of an executive office there. Foggo pleaded guilty, and at his sentencing in Alexandria in February 2009, where Judge James C. Cacheris gave him thirty-seven months, Forge told the court that "a man who exploits a national crisis by defrauding his country for years should have the humility to refrain from calling himself a patriot." His other prosecutions included a nationwide mortgage-origination fraud and a baby-selling ring run by a prominent surrogacy lawyer.

He brought the habits of that work to Robbins Geller. In Jones v. Pfizer, the securities case before Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein over Pfizer's off-label marketing of Bextra and other drugs, conduct the company had settled with the government for $2.3 billion in 2009, fact discovery had closed when Forge identified documents Pfizer had not produced. He obtained an order reopening discovery, and the investor team deposed the company's former chief executive, chief financial officer and general counsel again on the corrected record. Within six months of those depositions Pfizer agreed to pay $400 million; the agreement came on January 27, 2015, two weeks before the February 10 trial date, and Judge Hellerstein approved it on July 30. In In re American Realty Capital Properties, before the same judge, the company had admitted in October 2014 that its reported adjusted funds from operations for the first two quarters of the year had been intentionally misstated by about $23 million, and its former chief financial officer was later convicted of securities fraud. Judge Hellerstein certified the class on August 24, 2017. The plaintiffs defeated twelve motions for summary judgment brought by forty defendants and prepared for seventeen expert depositions; Forge led the examinations of the nine defense experts who had adopted a shared truth-on-the-market theory, and after those depositions the defendants withdrew their principal expert. On January 21, 2020, Judge Hellerstein approved a $1.025 billion settlement, $237.5 million of it paid by the individual defendants themselves.

A Verdict in Santa Ana

Hsu v. Puma Biotechnology was tried to a jury in Judge Andrew J. Guilford's courtroom in Santa Ana in January and February 2019. Investors who had bought Puma's stock between July 22, 2014 and May 13, 2015, with the Norfolk Pension Fund as lead plaintiff, alleged that the company and its chief executive, Alan H. Auerbach, had misrepresented the effectiveness of neratinib, the breast-cancer drug that was Puma's only product. Forge led the trial team, with Darren Robbins, Tor Gronborg, Trig Smith, J. Marco Janoski Gray, Ting Liu and Grace Cho, and put the clinical record, the challenged statement, the evidence of what the defendants knew and the market evidence before the jury. On February 4, 2019, the jury found that Puma and Auerbach had knowingly committed securities fraud and fixed the inflation in the stock at $4.50 a share, one of the few securities-fraud verdicts a jury has returned for investors since the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The court entered judgment for the approved claimants of $50,670,968.37 in principal damages plus prejudgment interest, and in August 2022 approved a settlement of about $54.2 million that paid every claimant in full.

Forge is Of Counsel in Robbins Geller's San Diego office. He graduated from the University of Michigan with high distinction in business and from Michigan Law School magna cum laude, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif, and was admitted in Michigan in 1994 and California in 1996; he practices before the Sixth and Ninth Circuits and has argued the Ninth Circuit en banc. He has taught white-collar crime at the University of San Diego School of Law and mock trial at the University of California, Davis. In the Trump University cases, which the firm handled without fee, the $25 million settlement approved in 2017 returned more than ninety percent of what the students had paid. "It's hard to overstate the significance of this verdict," he said after Puma, "because it confirms that jurors and investors alike demand integrity from corporations and their executives."