Katherine M. Sinderson
Securities Fraud · Investor-Side Litigation · Discovery · Trial Preparation
I’m grateful everyday for the opportunity to lead impactful cases alongside my amazing colleagues.
Two Trial Dates
In re Merck & Co. Securities Litigation was set for trial on March 1, 2016, in Judge Stanley R. Chesler's courtroom in Newark, more than a decade after it was filed. The case concerned Vioxx, the painkiller Merck withdrew from the world market on September 30, 2004 after a clinical trial confirmed its cardiovascular risk, and the investors, led by the Public Employees' Retirement System of Mississippi on behalf of everyone who bought Merck stock or call options between May 21, 1999 and October 29, 2004, alleged that the company had known the risk since the VIGOR study results of March 27, 2000 and had explained them away with the "naproxen hypothesis," the proposition that the comparison drug had protected patients' hearts rather than that Vioxx had harmed them. The case had been dismissed as untimely, revived by the Third Circuit on September 9, 2008, and confirmed by a unanimous Supreme Court on April 27, 2010 in Merck & Co. v. Reynolds, which held that the limitations period does not begin until a reasonably diligent investor could have discovered the facts showing the defendant's state of mind. Judge Chesler certified the class on January 30, 2013 and largely denied summary judgment on May 13, 2015. Katherine M. Sinderson was one of the leaders of the trial team. In January 2016, six weeks before jury selection, Merck agreed to a resolution valued at $1.062 billion, and the court approved it on June 28, 2016.
Bank of America had settled the same way four years earlier. Its shareholders had voted on December 5, 2008 to approve the acquisition of Merrill Lynch without being told that Merrill had lost tens of billions of dollars in the quarter or that its executives would be paid $5.8 billion in bonuses. Judge P. Kevin Castel certified the class in February 2012 and set trial for October 22. Sinderson was a member of the trial team that prepared the witnesses, the experts and the presentation a jury would have seen. On September 28, 2012, Bank of America agreed to pay $2.425 billion and adopt governance changes, and the court entered judgment on April 5, 2013. Neither jury was ever seated.
Two Hundred and Ten Million
In re Wilmington Trust Securities Litigation took eight years and ran alongside a criminal case. Investors who bought the bank's stock between January 18, 2008 and November 1, 2010, the day its sale to M&T Bank at a deep discount was announced, alleged that Wilmington Trust had hidden the deterioration of its commercial real-estate loans, understated its loan-loss provisions and sold new stock in a February 23, 2010 offering on those numbers. Sinderson led the case with Hannah Ross for a group of five public pension funds appointed lead plaintiff on March 7, 2011. In May 2015, two of the individual defendants were indicted and the SEC sued four of them; on January 6, 2016, a superseding indictment named the bank itself for conspiring to commit securities fraud. The court had stayed discovery on its own motion on July 2, 2015. Sinderson's team won a recommendation on August 16, 2016 compelling production of documents the bank said were protected by the bank-examination privilege, and the stay was lifted on December 28, 2016. On November 19, 2018, Judge Eduardo C. Robreno gave final approval to a $210 million settlement; the fund has been distributed five times, most recently in January 2025.
Kraft Heinz announced on February 21, 2019 that it was writing down the Kraft and Oscar Mayer brands by $15.4 billion, cutting its dividend and answering an SEC investigation into its procurement accounting, and the stock lost more than a quarter of its value in a day. Sinderson led the case with Salvatore J. Graziano for Sjunde AP-Fonden and Union Asset Management, on the theory that 3G Capital's cost-cutting had hollowed out the company's brands and supply chain while management described the savings as sustainable. Judge Robert M. Dow Jr. denied the motion to dismiss on August 11, 2021 and approved a $450 million settlement on September 12, 2023. The Washington Mutual case, which she led with Ross after the bank's seizure in September 2008, produced $216.75 million from its officers and directors, its underwriters and its auditor. In Six Flags, Judge Mark Pittman dismissed the investors' case over the company's statements about its parks in China on March 3, 2021; the Fifth Circuit reinstated nearly all of the claims on January 18, 2023 and reversed a second dismissal on April 18, 2024, and the case settled for $40 million, approved on January 28, 2025. Grand Canyon Education settled for $25.5 million in 2024 after its motion to dismiss failed, and with John Rizio-Hamilton she leads the iRhythm case over the Zio AT heart monitor, in which the court refused judgment on the pleadings in 2025.
Ten Days
Elon Musk's stake in Twitter crossed five percent on March 14, 2022. The securities laws gave him ten days to say so, and he said nothing until April 4, when he filed the form reserved for passive investors and disclosed a holding of 9.2 percent; the stock rose 27 percent that day. Sinderson's clients are the investors who sold Twitter shares between March 25 and April 4 while the market did not know what Musk had bought. She co-leads Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System v. Musk in the Southern District of New York with Jeremy P. Robinson, on the complaint's theory that Musk and his adviser Jared Birchall kept the purchases quiet so that the shares could be had "at the cheapest price possible," and on March 28, 2025, Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. denied the motion to dismiss the amended complaint in substantial part and sent the case into discovery. Musk bought the company for $44 billion in a deal that closed on October 27, 2022.
Her other pending case began with two crashes. Lion Air Flight 610 went down off Jakarta on October 29, 2018, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 near Addis Ababa on March 10, 2019, both Boeing 737 MAX aircraft, both after a flight-control system called MCAS pushed the nose down on faulty sensor data; 346 people died, and the fleet was grounded. In In re The Boeing Company Aircraft Securities Litigation, in the Northern District of Illinois, the Public Employees' Retirement System of Mississippi, appointed lead plaintiff on November 15, 2019, alleges on behalf of investors who bought Boeing stock between November 7, 2018 and December 16, 2019 that the company and its chief executive misled them about the safety of the airplane and the prospects of the program. Sinderson co-leads the case with Graziano and Scott R. Foglietta. The court denied Boeing's motion to dismiss in substantial part on August 23, 2022 and sustained the amended complaint in substantial part on September 30, 2024, and the case is in discovery before Judge Franklin U. Valderrama.
Sinderson graduated from Baylor University cum laude in 2002 on a Regents scholarship and from Georgetown University Law Center cum laude in 2006 as a Dean's Scholar, where she was an articles editor of the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law. She is admitted in New York, in the Southern District of New York, the Southern District of Texas and the Western District of Wisconsin, and before the Second, Third and Fifth Circuits. She co-chairs the Federal Bar Council's Securities Litigation Committee, lectures at Columbia, and in 2025 she spoke on the mediation-and-settlement panel of "Securities Litigation 2025: From Investigation to Trial," the Practising Law Institute's program. Boeing and Twitter are now where Merck and Bank of America were before their trial dates: past the motions to dismiss and into the record that a jury would be shown.
