Leslie R. Stern

Loss Is Not the Same as a Claim

Monitoring can begin with unusual price movement, purchases during a possible class period, or exposure to a disclosure. But the analysis Stern runs is deliberately unsentimental about size: a large trading loss can fall entirely outside a viable lawsuit, while a smaller position may raise a material disclosure or governance question worth pursuing. Case selection turns on the transaction history, the governing duty, causation, standing, traceability, and recoverable loss — never position size alone.

Her team tests transaction data against the challenged statements or omissions, accounts for corporate actions, security identifiers, partial sales, and shifting class periods, and draws the line that matters most to a fiduciary client: the difference between an estimated trading loss and a recoverable amount the evidence will actually support.

As a principal contact for many of the firm's public funds and other large investors, Stern advises on potential claims, recoveries, records preservation, lead-plaintiff responsibilities, pleadings, discovery, and settlement evaluation. She identifies the decisive information, applies the governing law, and lays out the available choices before an investor client authorizes the next step — the same counsel she would want if she sat on the client's side of the table.

Xerox and a $750 Million Class Recovery

Stern was a member of the litigation team representing Louisiana State Employees' Retirement System in the co-lead prosecution of Carlson v. Xerox — a five-year international accounting case against Xerox, certain top officers, and its auditor, KPMG. The record demanded organization on a global scale: transactions, accounting judgments, disclosures, and market effects had to be tracked across operating units, jurisdictions, and reporting periods, then connected into a single loss theory.

Trading exposure supplied only the starting point. The team then had to determine how the challenged accounting treatment affected reported performance, whether later information corrected the market, and which resulting losses were legally compensable. Stern's financial and accounting work supported the coordinated leadership team through discovery, expert analysis, motion practice, and resolution — helping align lead plaintiffs, lawyers, experts, and co-counsel around the accounting record, the loss theory, and the requested class relief.

The action settled for $750 million, one of the largest securities recoveries of its era. The court approved the agreement and awarded $120 million in attorneys' fees — 16% of the settlement fund — and $3,314,399.90 in litigation expenses, completing a court-supervised recovery for the investor class.

Bristol-Myers Squibb and UNUMProvident

In the Bristol-Myers Squibb securities case, Stern served on the litigation team representing Fresno County Employees' Retirement Association. Investors alleged that the company inflated revenue and earnings through channel stuffing and other quarter-end accounting practices — inventory pushed to wholesalers to make reported sales look like real demand. Stern's team placed the revenue-recognition rules directly beside the evidence of the company's commercial practices, and the gap between the two became the case. The parties agreed to a $300 million cash settlement, which Judge Loretta A. Preska approved in 2005.

In Giarraputo v. UNUMProvident, arising from the merger of UNUM and Provident, the complaint challenged statements about the combined company's integration and business performance. The merger setting required the team to compare representations made before and after the transaction with the operational record that followed — integration plans, operational compatibility, and post-merger statements all became part of the disclosure analysis. The parties reached a $45 million settlement in 2001, approved in 2002.

Governance and Trial Preparation

Stern's practice extends past purchaser classes to company-centered claims. She served as co-lead counsel in a derivative action concerning Oxford Health Plans, addressing fiduciary duties, management, stock transactions, and alleged harm to the corporation itself.

Her governance toolkit includes demands for books and records under Section 220 of the Delaware General Corporation Law for public-pension and Taft-Hartley clients. She defines the investigative purpose, negotiates scope, evaluates the resulting corporate record, and advises on the next step. A targeted Section 220 demand can establish what a board knew, what its committees considered, how controls operated, and which transactions were documented — before a stockholder decides whether the records support a governance response or a filed claim.

She has also served on trial teams in the Biogen and Zila matters, with Zila resolving during trial preparation. Those assignments — organizing witnesses, documents, expert analysis, and the burdens of proof that would govern in the courtroom — gave her direct experience testing a securities theory against the record that would have to carry it at trial. Every new matter she evaluates now gets measured against that standard.

Securities-Practice Leadership

Stern is a partner in Berman Tabacco's Boston office, a member of the firm's Executive Committee, and a lead partner in its Securities Practice Group, alongside her leadership of new-case investigations and portfolio monitoring. Those responsibilities connect policy and execution: the lawyer helping decide whether an institutional investor should act also supervises the analytical system used to estimate the loss, and understands exactly how the resulting complaint will be attacked.

She earned a finance degree from American University and graduated cum laude from Suffolk University Law School, where she served on the law review's editorial board. Before joining Berman Tabacco in 1998, she practiced general civil litigation. The finance training powers the portfolio-loss analysis; the early courtroom years supplied the feel for pleadings, contested records, and case preparation that no monitoring algorithm can replace.