John Rizio-Hamilton
Securities Fraud · Public Pension Funds · Offering Claims · Complex Records
Shareholders deserve their day in court when misrepresentations distort our securities markets.
February 26, 2017
On February 26, 2017, about 250 declarations filed in a nine-year-old arbitration against Sterling Jewelers, the Signet Jewelers subsidiary that runs the Kay and Jared stores, became public with the company's redactions. The arbitration, Jock v. Sterling Jewelers, had been filed in March 2008 on behalf of some 69,000 women who worked in roughly 1,500 stores, and the declarations came from nearly 200 current and former employees. Melissa Corey, a store manager in Massachusetts and Florida from 2002 to 2008, said the behavior toward women was done out in the open and appeared to be encouraged, or at least condoned. Kristin Henry said she was twenty-two when a district manager tried to grope and kiss her at a managers' event, and that after she reported it she was accused of theft and fired. Sanya Douglas, a Kay sales associate and manager in New York from 2003 to 2008, described the phrase managers used for the favors expected of women who wanted to advance. The chief executive, Mark Light, was named in the allegations. Sterling said it had investigated and found the allegations unsubstantiated. The Washington Post reported the declarations the next day, and Signet's stock fell 8.3 percent, then 13 percent by the close on February 28.
The Public Employees' Retirement System of Mississippi, appointed lead plaintiff on July 27, 2017, sued Signet in the Southern District of New York for the investors who bought its stock between August 29, 2013 and May 25, 2017, and John Rizio-Hamilton led the trial team with Rebecca Boon and Megan Taggart. The complaint joined two sets of statements. Signet had described its in-house credit portfolio as conservatively managed under stringent underwriting until, on May 25, 2017, it disclosed that 45 percent of the portfolio was subprime. And its Code of Conduct had told investors that the company made decisions solely on merit, disciplined misconduct and gave employees a confidential way to report it, while the declarations described a workplace in which advancement was conditioned on sexual demands. Chief Judge Colleen McMahon denied the motion to dismiss on November 26, 2018, certified the class on July 10, 2019, and on November 26, 2019 denied Signet's motion for judgment on the pleadings, holding that the Code statements were actionable because they were "directly at odds with" the conduct alleged; "context matters," she wrote. Signet agreed on March 16, 2020 to pay $240 million, and Judge McMahon approved the settlement on July 21, 2020.
Rizio and Hamilton
"My parents were plaintiffs' lawyers," Rizio-Hamilton has said. Their firm, Rizio and Hamilton, handled personal-injury cases in Philadelphia, where he grew up, and the talk at the dinner table was about what that work was like. He wanted to be a writer after Johns Hopkins, where he graduated with honors in 1997, and came to Brooklyn as a local news reporter covering community news and politics, with a weekly column on Brooklyn politics, before he chose law school. At Brooklyn Law School he was editor-in-chief of the Brooklyn Law Review and was placed on a moot court team with the woman he would marry; they traveled together to the J. Braxton Craven Memorial Constitutional Law Moot Court Competition. "We fell in love – and we won the competition," he has said. He graduated summa cum laude in 2004 and clerked for Judge Sidney H. Stein of the Southern District of New York and Judge Chester J. Straub of the Second Circuit, and what he took from the clerkships, in his words, is that a lawyer has to be "extremely driven and scrappy" and keep digging.
He joined Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann and made partner five years later. He is co-head of the firm's securities litigation department, handles its outreach to institutional investors in Canada, where he advises funds on claims under United States law and dual listings such as Penn West's on the New York and Toronto exchanges, joined the board of the Federal Bar Foundation in November 2023, and on February 12, 2026 was appointed to the firm's Executive Committee.
Pick-A-Pay
The cases he came up through were the financial-crisis cases. In Bank of America, before Judge P. Kevin Castel, the Fort Worth Employees' Retirement Fund and the City of Miami General Employees' and Sanitation Employees' Retirement Trust alleged that the bank had concealed Merrill Lynch's losses, and an agreement allowing up to $5.8 billion in bonuses, before shareholders voted on the merger on December 5, 2008; the court sustained the claims on August 27, 2010 and certified the class on February 6, 2012, and on September 28, 2012 the bank agreed to pay $2.425 billion and adopt governance changes, approved in April 2013. Rizio-Hamilton was a case leader and part of the trial team. In Wachovia, before Judge Richard J. Sullivan, the Orange County Employees' Retirement System, the Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension and Relief Fund and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority sued over more than $35 billion of bonds and preferred securities sold between July 31, 2006 and May 29, 2008 while, as the funds alleged, the bank misstated the quality of its Pick-A-Pay option-ARM mortgage portfolio; he led the case, which settled for $590 million from Wachovia and $37 million from KPMG, $627 million in all, announced August 5, 2011 and entered as a final judgment on January 3, 2012. In the JPMorgan "London Whale" case before Judge George B. Daniels, for the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System and the Oregon public funds, the question was what the bank's Chief Investment Office had been doing between April 13 and May 21, 2012, when its chief executive called the first reports "a complete tempest in a teapot" and the losses passed $5 billion; he was among the case leaders, and the $150 million settlement was approved on May 10, 2016. He was also counsel for the institutional investors in the Citigroup bond litigation, which recovered $730 million.
Both Sides of the Trade
ViacomCBS announced a secondary offering of Class B common stock and an initial offering of 5.75 percent Series A mandatory convertible preferred stock on March 22, 2021, priced them on March 23 and closed them on March 26. In the same week Archegos Capital Management, Bill Hwang's family office, collapsed; its banks lost nearly $10 billion unwinding its positions, and Viacom was among the largest of them. The Camelot Event Driven Fund and the Municipal Police Employees' Retirement System sued the underwriters in the Commercial Division of the New York Supreme Court under the Securities Act, alleging that Morgan Stanley, which sold 45 percent of the offering, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo had been Archegos's prime brokers, carried exposure to Viacom's stock through total-return swaps with it, said nothing of the conflict in the offering documents, and sold blocks of the stock at distressed prices as the family office failed. Rizio-Hamilton led the trial team with Rebecca Boon.
The court sustained the claims against the underwriters on February 7, 2023 and certified the class on January 4, 2024. Discovery, finished on January 24, 2025, produced 1.5 million pages from the defendants and former defendants, 270,000 pages from twelve third parties and thirty-nine fact depositions. Layn R. Phillips mediated on November 7, 2024, January 6, 2025 and February 6, 2025; the parties accepted his recommendation of $120 million on February 24, 2025 and signed the agreement on March 27, and the court granted preliminary approval on April 3 and entered final judgment on August 5, 2025.
Zio AT
Silvergate Capital ran a bank for digital-asset companies, and its Silvergate Exchange Network moved their dollars; FTX and Alameda Research were among its customers. Four pension funds, the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 793 Members Pension Benefit Trust of Ontario, the Indiana Public Retirement System, the Boston Retirement System and the Public School Teachers' Pension and Retirement Fund of Chicago, sued in the Southern District of California over the bank's statements about its safeguards against high-risk customers after FTX's collapse set off an $8.1 billion decline in its deposits. Rizio-Hamilton was co-lead counsel with Hannah Ross, Avi Josefson and Jonathan Uslaner, and the court approved a $37.5 million settlement on September 9, 2025.
In the Northern District of California, before Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, he and Katherine Sinderson represent the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System and the investors who bought iRhythm Technologies stock between July 25, 2022 and August 9, 2024, over the company's statements about its Zio AT heart monitor, including the claim that it monitored patients in real time; the disclosures that followed included lowered forecasts, an FDA inspection, a Department of Justice subpoena and an FDA letter on the marketing claims. In November 2025 Judge Corley denied iRhythm's motion for judgment on the pleadings and left her earlier rulings in place. Notice of a $45 million settlement went to the class on August 6, 2026, with claims due October 1 and the approval hearing set for November 5, 2026.
