Joseph J. Tabacco Jr.
Securities Litigation · Financial Markets · Antitrust · Investor-Side Litigation
This was a tough, drawn-out case and we are delighted that the plaintiffs are finally beginning to receive the money they are owed. We also believe the injunctive relief we achieved will benefit U.S. diamond purchasers at the wholesale and retail level well into the future.
The Number Published Every Morning
Some prices are set by markets. Others are set by a phone call.
Each business day, panels of major banks submitted the figures from which global benchmark rates — Euribor, yen LIBOR, Euroyen TIBOR — were calculated. Trillions of dollars in derivatives, loans, and other instruments moved with those numbers. The benchmarks were supposed to reflect the market. The litigation Joseph J. Tabacco Jr. oversaw alleged that, for years, traders and submitters at major banks coordinated to move the numbers instead.
Proving it meant reconstructing the machinery. His teams traced how each rate was assembled, how individual derivatives referenced it, and how alleged coordination among submitters rippled outward into particular instruments, particular counterparties, particular days. Trader communications sat beside econometric analysis; benchmark-setting procedures sat beside instrument-level trading records. In the Euribor litigation, with the California State Teachers' Retirement System among the represented investors, approved settlements total $491.5 million. The related yen LIBOR and Euroyen TIBOR actions produced another $307 million.
It was the kind of case Tabacco had been training for since before most benchmark traders were born.
Seven Years as the Government's Trial Lawyer
Tabacco earned his law degree with honors from George Washington University Law School in 1974 and went almost directly into the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, where he spent seven years as a trial attorney and then senior trial attorney, in both the Central District of California and the Southern District of New York.
Federal antitrust enforcement is a school with one curriculum: contested market evidence. Cartels do not confess. They leave traces — in pricing patterns, in meetings, in the testimony of witnesses who must be examined with precision — and the government lawyer's job is to assemble those traces into proof that survives cross-examination. Tabacco entered private practice in 1981 carrying that discipline with him, and in 1995 he founded the San Francisco office of what is now Berman Tabacco, building it into a national platform for antitrust and securities litigation on behalf of investors.
Every major matter since has been, at bottom, the same problem in a new market: what does coordination look like in the evidence, and how do you show a court the difference between a market moving and a market being moved?
A Cartel in Diamonds, a Deal in Pills
In the De Beers litigation, diamond resellers alleged monopolization of the worldwide diamond supply — a market controlled for generations by a company that had long stayed beyond the reach of American courts. The class obtained a $295 million settlement, and something rarer than money: injunctive terms that included De Beers' submission to the court's jurisdiction for enforcement. The company that had structured itself to remain outside the courthouse agreed to be bound by one.
Cardizem posed a different question about a different market. A brand-name drug company had paid a generic competitor to stay out — cash in exchange for delayed entry, with consumers covering the difference at the pharmacy counter. Tabacco served as co-lead counsel for Aetna and the class in the first case of its kind brought to challenge the practice. The Sixth Circuit treated the agreement as a per se unlawful market allocation, and the case produced an $80 million settlement — the first in which consumers received direct compensation from a reverse-payment claim. The theory pioneered there became a fixture of pharmaceutical antitrust law.
In the lithium-ion-battery litigation, purchasers alleged a conspiracy to fix prices for the rechargeable cells inside the world's laptops and phones; the case settled for $139.3 million after work separating ordinary market movement from alleged coordination and building a classwide damages model. And in the California Automobile Antitrust Cases, Tabacco carried the litigation for nearly twenty years, finally resolving it with the last remaining defendant, Ford Motor Company of Canada, just weeks before trial. Some cases are won quickly. Others are won by the lawyer who is still standing at the end.
CalPERS and the Ratings That Were Not Just Opinions
When the California Public Employees' Retirement System lost heavily on three structured investment vehicles, it faced a doctrine as much as a defendant. Credit-rating agencies had long argued that their ratings were opinions — protected speech, broadcast to the world, actionable by no one.
CalPERS brought a direct action alleging that the agencies made negligent misrepresentations when they stamped investment-grade ratings on privately placed securities. Tabacco argued the agencies' appeal and secured a published California decision allowing the pension fund's claims to proceed. The court accepted the distinction he framed: ratings distributed to a select group in connection with private placements — marketed with the securities, aimed at a limited audience, prepared with knowledge of their intended use — could be treated differently from opinions broadcast to the general public.
The published ruling preserved the claims, and the claims produced settlements with Standard & Poor's and Moody's totaling $255 million for the fund.
IndyMac and the Defunct Issuer
The IndyMac Mortgage-Backed Securities Litigation began with a problem that would have ended a lesser case: the issuer was defunct. Whatever the offering documents had misstated about the underwriting of the loans behind the certificates, the company that issued them could not pay.
The Wyoming State Treasurer and Wyoming Retirement System served as lead plaintiffs, and Tabacco directed major phases of the litigation toward the defendants who could: the underwriters, each armed with a due-diligence defense. Answering those defenses required proof built certificate by certificate — evidence specific to each offering document, each underwriting process, each purchaser transaction — while holding the common Securities Act theory together across multiple offerings. The offering-specific record kept the case anchored to the represented purchases rather than dissolving into a generalized story about the housing collapse.
An initial agreement contributed $6 million; the underwriter defendants later agreed to pay $340 million. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan approved the resulting $346 million class settlement in February 2015 — a substantial funded recovery built for a case where the obvious defendant had ceased to exist.
The Litigator in the Boardroom
Since 2007, Tabacco has also served on the board of the publicly traded company now known as Bed Bath & Beyond, Inc., which previously operated as Beyond, Inc. and Overstock.com. In February 2026 he became Lead Independent Director, and he chairs the board's Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. The lawyer who spent a career testing how boards govern now sits inside one, applying the standards he spent decades enforcing.
He founded Berman Tabacco's San Francisco office, serves on the firm's Executive Committee, and continues to handle securities, antitrust, benchmark-rate, mortgage-backed-securities, and other complex investor matters. He lectures and writes frequently on securities and antitrust issues, work that reaches back to his days as a teaching fellow of the Attorney General's Advocacy Institute in Washington.
Tabacco earned his undergraduate degree in government from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his law degree with honors from George Washington University Law School. He is admitted in California, Massachusetts, New York, and multiple federal courts.