John Rizio-Hamilton

For decades, securities law and workplace-abuse law lived on different floors of the courthouse. A company could harbor a culture of severe sexual harassment, and as long as the stock price was the plaintiff's subject, the culture was somebody else's case.

John Rizio-Hamilton joined those floors. In the Signet Jewelers litigation, he and his partner Rebecca Boon represented the Public Employees' Retirement System of Mississippi in claims that the jewelry giant had misled investors twice over: about an in-house credit portfolio described as conservative until the company disclosed it was substantially subprime, and about a workplace — documented through a massive gender-discrimination arbitration reaching senior leadership — that bore no resemblance to the integrity the company advertised. The theory demanded that two utterly different bodies of evidence be fused into one investor case: credit data and disclosure timing on one side; declarations, arbitration records, and management knowledge on the other, each stream assigned to falsity, scienter, materiality, and loss causation.

The court sustained the complaint in November 2018, and the case drove toward trial until it resolved for $240 million — the first successful securities fraud class action ever built on allegations of sexual harassment. The result established that a company's treatment of its people can be material to its investors. The precedent now informs boardroom conversations about culture and disclosure.

Finding the Conflict Archegos Hid

In March 2021, Viacom completed stock offerings days before Archegos Capital Management — a family office almost no one was watching — collapsed and took billions of market value with it. Investors in the offerings alleged something the documents never mentioned: certain underwriters selling them the stock held enormous, highly leveraged exposure to that very stock through total-return swaps with Archegos, and stood on both sides of the moment.

In Camelot Event Driven Fund v. Morgan Stanley, Rizio-Hamilton and Boon led the Securities Act class action in New York state court, reconstructing relationships invisible on the face of the offering papers: swap exposure and prime-brokerage positions mapped onto underwriting roles, diligence, block sales, and what buyers of common and preferred stock were told. The record grew to more than 1.5 million pages from defendants and former defendants, more than 270,000 pages from a dozen third parties, and thirty-nine fact depositions — an anatomy of a hidden conflict, assembled page by page.

The parties accepted a mediator's recommendation of $120 million, finally approved in August 2025. Only one state-court Securities Act recovery has been larger.

Billions, Bank by Bank

Rizio-Hamilton came up through the financial crisis cases that defined a generation of securities litigators, and the results track the era's largest failures. He was a key part of the trial team in the Bank of America litigation over the Merrill Lynch acquisition, which settled for $2.425 billion with corporate-governance reforms as trial approached — among the largest securities class action recoveries in history. He led the Wachovia bond and preferred-securities case for public pension funds, a labyrinth of offerings and security classes that produced a $627 million global settlement while demanding that every offering document and every purchaser's loss stay precisely sorted. He helped lead the JPMorgan "London Whale" litigation over understated trading exposure in the bank's Chief Investment Office, approved at $150 million in 2016.

When the crises changed shape, so did his cases. In Silvergate, he helped lead pension-fund claims arising from the collapse of the banking platform at the center of the digital-asset economy — translating crypto-era facts about compliance controls, customer concentration, and liquidity into classic securities proof, and securing a $37.5 million settlement approved in 2025. With his partner Katherine Sinderson, he leads the iRhythm action over statements about the Zio AT cardiac monitor's capabilities and intended patients, a case knitting together FDA communications, product marketing, and market disclosures; after the core claims were sustained, the court in 2025 rejected the defense bid for judgment on the pleadings, and the evidence-building goes on. Subprime credit, hedge-fund swaps, crypto banking, medical devices: the subject matter never repeats, and the method never changes — master the record, assign every document to an element, and be visibly ready for trial.

Partner in Five Years

The law ran in Rizio-Hamilton's family, and his path through it was fast. A Johns Hopkins graduate with honors, he took his J.D. summa cum laude from Brooklyn Law School in 2004, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Brooklyn Law Review and won first place in the J. Braxton Craven Memorial Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition. He clerked twice in the courts where his cases would one day live — for Judge Sidney H. Stein in the Southern District of New York and Judge Chester J. Straub on the Second Circuit — absorbing, from the bench's side of the room, how records are built, issues preserved, and completed cases judged.

He then joined Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann and made partner within five years, among the youngest in the firm's history. Today he is Co-Head of BLB&G's Securities Litigation Department and, as of February 2026, a member of the firm's Executive Committee — helping steer the country's premier investor-side securities firm. He also leads BLB&G's outreach to institutional investors in Canada, advising funds across the border on U.S. claims, lead-plaintiff duties, and recovery.

He is a board member of the Federal Bar Foundation and a frequent voice — at the Federal Bar Council, PLI, and in the pages of securities-law journals — on auditor liability and market integrity. Billions of dollars recovered for investors sit behind his work, but Signet may be the truest measure of him: the case that did not exist until he built it.