Julie G. Reiser

Nineteen Hundred Pages Before the First Complaint

The records arrived before the lawsuit did.

Before filing a consolidated claim in California, plaintiffs' counsel used statutory stockholder inspection demands to assemble roughly 1,900 pages of Alphabet's internal record, including board minutes, committee agendas, policies, executive employment and termination agreements, and director and officer questionnaires.

Julie Goldsmith Reiser was one of the lawyers reading those pages.

The pension funds she represented sued derivatively on Alphabet's behalf, alleging failures in the board's oversight of workplace harassment, discrimination, and retaliation. In that posture, the stockholders assert the corporation's injury and seek relief that flows back into the company. The claims therefore depended on Alphabet's own corporate record.

The derivative matter also involved proceedings in three jurisdictions and a special litigation committee.

By mediation, Reiser and co-counsel had assembled the internal record from the multi-jurisdiction proceedings and the special litigation committee process.

Two Days in January, Then Ten Years of Obligations

Reiser served as plaintiffs' co-lead counsel. The mediation began on January 22, 2020, before retired Judge James Kleinberg, who selected Reiser and Frank Bottini for the California plaintiffs' working group. Two days of negotiation opened into months of it: targeted document review, consultation with governance and workplace specialists, the vetting of candidates for an outside advisory council. The parties signed a memorandum of understanding on April 20, then completed confirmatory review — more than 5,300 additional pages, and an interview with counsel for Alphabet's special litigation committee — before presenting the final stipulation.

Reiser signed it for Northern California Pipe Trades Pension Plan and Teamsters Local 272 Labor Management Pension Fund.

The settlement imposed funded, multi-year governance and workplace obligations.

Alphabet agreed to spend $310 million over as many as ten years on workplace initiatives — opportunities for underrepresented technologists, hiring and retention, respectful-workplace programs, participation in the digital economy. A Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Advisory Council would exist for at least five years, meet at least quarterly, and deliver written reports to the chief executive and a board committee every quarter for the first three years. The chief diversity officer would report annually on the spending. Google would publish an account of it in its public diversity reporting.

The council included senior company officials, while outside specialists were jointly selected by the company and plaintiffs' co-lead counsel. After the first three years, the council could move from quarterly to annual reporting only by unanimous vote.

The agreement extended Alphabet's waiver of mandatory arbitration to harassment, discrimination, and retaliation disputes across employees and the extended workforce. It preserved limits on confidentiality provisions so that complainants could discuss the underlying facts and the reporting process. It assigned board committees defined oversight duties, required quarterly compliance information, mandated notice of serious complaints involving senior executives, and required annual reporting on harassment, discrimination, retaliation, training, and workplace culture.

The company renamed its Audit Committee the Audit and Compliance Committee, gave it explicit responsibility for legal and regulatory compliance including data privacy, required separate mid-quarter meetings, and created direct reporting routes for senior compliance and investigations officials — with reports flowing from management and a rapid-response team handling specified serious matters, and quarterly reporting to the full board.

A settlement term could be modified only after a good-faith board determination, advice from outside counsel, written reasons, a narrowly tailored change, and at least thirty days' notice to stockholders' counsel.

On November 30, 2020, the Santa Clara County Superior Court granted final approval. The judgment ended the litigation; the obligations were built to outlast it.

A Model She Helped Invent

Reiser helped develop derivative litigation as a vehicle for funded, time-bound workplace and governance reforms. The Alphabet settlement applied that approach to alleged board-level oversight failures through enforceable corporate commitments.

She settled a shareholder derivative suit against Wynn Resorts with a net settlement value of $90 million. Through comparable derivative actions at Pinterest and L Brands, she helped shareholders secure what now totals $550 million in corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments, alongside sweeping governance and workplace-policy changes at those companies.

Reiser's derivative settlements have imposed duties that continue after judgment: councils that must convene, officers who must report, boards that must review, and written terms that executives, outside advisers, and stockholders' counsel can monitor for years. Those obligations differ from a cash fund distributed after a conventional securities class settlement.

Countrywide: 427 Offerings, One Fund

The Countrywide mortgage-backed-securities litigation presented a different problem: scale across 427 offerings.

Iowa Public Employees' Retirement System and other purchasers alleged that offering documents for 427 separate Countrywide mortgage-backed-securities offerings misstated or omitted material facts about loan-origination practices, with claims under Sections 11, 12, and 15 of the Securities Act. Reiser represented IPERS, which the court appointed lead plaintiff because it held the greatest financial interest.

Hundreds of offerings issued from 2005 through 2007 carried their own certificates, disclosures, and limitations periods. The pleading had to trace each named plaintiff's purchases to the particular certificates and offerings challenged while connecting those transactions to the alleged origination practices. Reiser helped carry the case through standing and timeliness disputes, amended pleading, consolidation, and settlement.

The settlement created a $500 million cash fund. Judge Mariana Pfaelzer granted final approval and approved the allocation plan on December 5, 2013; final judgment twelve days later certified the settlement class, appointed the investor plaintiffs as class representatives, and appointed Cohen Milstein and two other firms as class counsel. Reiser submitted a declaration supporting the settlement and the plan that would translate an aggregate fund into payments on recognized losses. One appeal was voluntarily dismissed in November 2014; the Ninth Circuit dismissed the remaining consolidated appeals with prejudice in May 2016; and in October 2016, after claims administration, the district court entered a class distribution order authorizing disbursement under the approved plan.

The settlement remained in place through dismissal of the appeals and the district court's 2016 distribution order.

BP: A Class Built to Survive Appeal

When the Deepwater Horizon spill began in April 2010, the market's first question was how bad it was. Post-spill purchasers of BP American Depositary Shares alleged that BP and senior executives understated the spill's severity, limiting investors' ability to assess its financial implications.

Reiser led one of the litigation teams, with Cohen Milstein serving as co-lead counsel for the New York State Common Retirement Fund. The case demanded a theory sturdy enough for classwide treatment: a disclosure chronology, price movement, and a common damages model — stock-price inflation tied to corrective information reaching the market — joined in a form a court of appeals would accept.

The Fifth Circuit affirmed certification of the post-spill investor class, covering purchasers from April 26 through May 28, 2010. The certified class settled for $175 million, with final approval granted on February 13, 2017.

The Wider Ledger

Reiser was a member of the Cohen Milstein team that secured a $1 billion all-cash settlement against Wells Fargo in 2023 — among the largest securities class action settlements ever reached, and one of the largest of its decade.

Earlier in her career, Reiser worked on the litigation and settlement of Beck v. The Boeing Co., a sex-discrimination class action over compensation and promotions resolved for $72.5 million, and represented African American Kroger employees in pay and promotion claims in Wade v. Kroger. Both matters used companywide evidence to address alleged systemic practices affecting employees.

Across more than twenty-five years of practice, she has led or played an instrumental role in more than one hundred matters and recovered billions of dollars for investors.

Practice and Background

Reiser is a partner in Cohen Milstein's Washington office and co-chairs the firm's Securities Litigation & Investor Protection practice, representing public pension plans, institutional investors, retirees, and plan participants in securities, ERISA, and antitrust litigation. She joined the firm in 1999.

She earned her J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1997 and her B.A., with honors, from Vassar College in 1992. She is admitted in the District of Columbia and Washington.