Laura H. Posner

Then a professor showed her something she had not considered — the reach of plaintiff-side class actions, the way one case could move money and power back toward the people it had been taken from. She summered at a plaintiffs' class action firm and never looked back. Not because she abandoned the original plan, but because she found another route to the same destination. The teachers, firefighters, police officers, and union workers whose pensions she now protects are the clients she went to law school for. She has said the work still tracks her initial goal: fighting for the underdog.

The Regulator

In 2014 the New Jersey Attorney General appointed Posner Bureau Chief of the New Jersey Bureau of Securities — the state's top securities regulator. For three years she administered and enforced the New Jersey Uniform Securities Law, ran the bureau's staff, and decided, matter by matter, which conduct warranted civil action, which warranted administrative action, and which belonged in a criminal courtroom. Investigative choices, legal authority, and public protection sat within one chain of responsibility, and she held the chain.

Cases prosecuted under her direction returned hundreds of millions of dollars to New Jersey residents and produced more than twenty criminal convictions. She simultaneously served as Enforcement Chair of the North American Securities Administrators Association — the organization of every state, territorial, and provincial securities regulator in the United States, Canada, and Mexico — helping New Jersey lead multistate enforcement and shape securities policy across the continent.

Those years also taught her what it means to be the client. Running the bureau, she sat on the receiving end of pitches from outside law firms, and she carried two lessons into private practice: be extremely circumspect about when to bring a potential case to a large public fund, because most cases are not worth a pension system's involvement; and make sure the damage and loss figures given to a client are as realistic as possible. Her counseling practice at Cohen Milstein is built on both.

A Billion-Dollar Recovery Built in Litigation

After the fake-accounts scandal, Wells Fargo operated under regulatory consent orders governing its consumer practices. Public pension systems — the Public Employees' Retirement System of Mississippi and the Employees' Retirement System of Rhode Island among them — alleged that the bank and former executives overstated its progress under those orders, telling investors the compliance work was further along than it was.

Posner helped lead the investor case. The work required laying the consent orders' actual requirements alongside what the bank reported, what its internal operations showed, what later disclosures revealed, and how the market responded when the gap became visible. For pension clients with duties to protect retirement assets, she developed the materiality link — the connection between the compliance shortfall, what investors understood, and what the shares did when investors understood more.

The case settled for $1 billion in cash. On September 8, 2023, the district court granted final approval and approved the class, allocation, and administration structure. The settlement was the largest securities class action settlement of 2023 and among the largest ever — and it was reached without any parallel restatement or related enforcement action by the SEC or the Department of Justice. The record that supported it was built in the litigation itself, through substantial motion practice and discovery.

Over her career Posner has recovered billions for defrauded investors.

The Auditor's Opinion

When SCANA abandoned its multibillion-dollar nuclear-expansion project in South Carolina, IBEW Local 98 Pension Fund sued Deloitte over the audit work behind the company's financial statements. Cohen Milstein served as sole lead counsel, and Posner's team took on a question that securities cases rarely reach: not what a company said, but what its auditor knew when it blessed what the company said.

The team assembled the audit opinions, the project records, the underlying financial statements, the professional judgments, the supporting evidence, and the state of mind behind the reported opinion — then connected each element to investor loss. The case survived dismissal, proceeded through class certification, and reached full summary-judgment briefing, each stage demanding a deeper account of what the auditor examined and the basis for its conclusions.

The district court granted final approval to a $34 million cash settlement on March 2, 2026.

What the Board Should Have Seen

Posner's derivative work turns the same discipline inward, toward boards. Her matters at Pinterest, L Brands, and Wynn Resorts arose from allegations of discrimination, harassment, and failures of board oversight — and sought relief for the corporations themselves rather than payments to trading classes. In this line of cases she obtained the first-ever demand futility decision arising from such allegations, a ruling that remains one of a kind.

The L Brands matter began the way the strongest derivative cases begin: with a Delaware books-and-records demand and a documents-first investigation. The court-approved settlement reformed nondisclosure agreements, arbitration practices, conduct policies, and diversity initiatives. Pinterest committed substantial funding and adopted workplace and board reforms. Wynn combined cash relief with governance measures.

Across all three, the settlement terms operated at the level where change endures — reporting channels, board review, complaint investigation, escalation, accountability. Funding commitments and governance structures, not press releases.

Counsel Before the Claim

Much of Posner's work happens before any complaint is filed. As a partner in Cohen Milstein's Ethics and Fiduciary Counseling practice, she advises public pension trustees and administrators on governance, economic conditions, portfolio management, litigation authority, documentation, cost, risk, and the remedy a proposed proceeding could actually deliver. The counseling helps a fund distinguish ordinary market movement from potentially actionable conduct — and decide whether litigation would advance its obligations to beneficiaries or merely occupy its time.

She extends the same thinking into policy. In November 2023 she was named president of the Institute for Law and Economic Policy, one of the country's leading foundations on investor access to the civil justice system, and she contributes amicus briefs on omission liability, Securities Act traceability, and pleading standards. She has guest-taught at Columbia Law School on market manipulation — spoofing, layering, wash trading — the frontier where her litigation practice now operates.

Posner earned her undergraduate degree from UCLA and her law degree from Harvard Law School.