Leslie R. Stern

The agreement, in force from March 11, 2011 to March 11, 2015, required Walmart to run a program across its more than 5,000 pharmacies to detect and prevent diversion, with procedures for doctor-shopping, early refills, forged prescriptions and unlicensed prescribers, and to report refusals to fill within seven business days. The complaint, as Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster recounted it, described a compliance team that asked for a $40 million budget and received $11 million; a full-time floater pharmacist who in August 2012 notified the board's chairman and the Global Ethics Office that pharmacists were filling red-flagged prescriptions; and a March 2013 report to the audit committee that the tool meant to monitor suspicious controlled-substance activity remained "in status of red."

The directors and officers argued that the funds had waited too long to sue. On April 12, 2023 Laster rejected that defense, writing that the purpose of equitable tolling is to ensure that fiduciaries "cannot use their own success at concealing their misconduct" to immunize themselves from accountability, and on April 26 he held that the claims over the DEA agreement and Walmart's compliance as a dispenser could go forward. Walmart's board formed a special litigation committee on May 5, 2023, with Randall Stephenson, the former executive chairman of AT&T, as its only member. In October 2024 the parties filed a settlement under which the defendants' insurers would pay $123 million to Walmart and the company would maintain specified governance practices for at least five years. Laster approved it on December 20, 2024.

Margin Normalization

Stern was a member of the Berman DeValerio team that represented the Louisiana State Employees' Retirement System, the only institutional investor among the co-lead plaintiffs, in Carlson v. Xerox Corp. in the District of Connecticut, a case against Xerox, certain of its top officers and its auditor, KPMG. The plaintiffs alleged a four-year scheme to disguise Xerox's operating performance through its lease accounting: artificially low interest-rate assumptions that raised the present value of long-term leases in Brazil, Mexico and other high-interest countries; a "margin normalization" method that shifted revenue from service to equipment and pulled $617 million in equipment revenue forward between 1997 and 2000, a practice described inside KPMG as "half-baked revenue recognition"; and $129 million in uncollectible receivables at the Mexican unit, hidden through renegotiated contracts and manipulated invoices. In the complaint's account, James F. Bingham, an assistant treasurer, had written a memorandum on accounting irregularities reaching beyond Mexico and was fired after raising them.

Judge Alvin W. Thompson denied the motions to dismiss of Xerox, six of its officers and KPMG on July 13, 2005, finding "strong circumstantial evidence of recklessness" in the Xerox defendants' knowledge of facts and access to information that contradicted their public statements. The team worked through millions of documents, tracked the transactions, accounting judgments, disclosures and market effects across operating units, countries and reporting periods, and connected them into a single theory of loss. Stern's financial and accounting work supported the leadership group through discovery, expert analysis, motion practice and resolution. The case settled for $750 million in cash. Judge Thompson approved the settlement in January 2009, awarding counsel 16 percent of the fund, $120 million, and $3,314,399.90 in expenses.

Channel Stuffing

In the Bristol-Myers Squibb securities litigation in the Southern District of New York, she was on the team representing the Fresno County Employees' Retirement Association. Investors alleged that the company had inflated its revenue and earnings through channel stuffing and other quarter-end practices, pushing inventory to wholesalers so that sales looked like demand, and her team set the revenue-recognition rules against the evidence of the company's dealings with its wholesalers. On August 4, 2004 the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that Bristol-Myers would pay $150 million, $50 million of it into a fund for shareholders, to settle charges that it had improperly recognized $1.5 billion in sales in 2000 and 2001 while covering wholesalers' carrying costs and guaranteeing them a return on their investment. The investor class settled for $300 million in cash, which Judge Loretta A. Preska approved.

Giarraputo v. UNUMProvident, filed in the District of Maine on September 30, 1999, arose from the merger of UNUM and Provident. The complaint alleged that the joint proxy statement had not disclosed the effect of rising disability claims on earnings and that reserves for disability claims and merger costs were understated, and it set the combined company's statements about its integration and business performance, before and after the transaction, against the operating record that followed. The parties reached a $45 million settlement in October 2001, which Judge Gene Carter approved on June 27, 2002. She was co-lead counsel in a derivative action on behalf of Oxford Health Plans concerning its management, its fiduciaries' duties, stock transactions and the harm alleged to the company itself, and she served on the trial teams in the Biogen securities case in the District of Massachusetts and the Zila case in the District of Arizona, which resolved during trial preparation, organizing the witnesses, documents and expert analysis each would have required in the courtroom.

Pinnacle Wireless

On May 7, 2013 Stern and Jay W. Eng of Berman DeValerio were among the lawyers who filed Harvey v. UniTek Global Services in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for investors who had bought UniTek securities between May 18, 2011 and April 12, 2013. The complaint alleged that employees of UniTek's Pinnacle Wireless subsidiary had improperly recognized revenue, inflating the company's financial statements throughout that period; that its internal controls had failed to detect or prevent the practice; and that senior executives had described the company's performance and the effectiveness of those controls while knowing of it.

She chairs the firm's New Case Investigations Team, which evaluates possible violations of the securities laws and recommends a course of action, and oversees its portfolio monitoring program, whose analysts estimate losses for public pension funds, labor funds and other investors. The review can begin with an unusual price movement, purchases during a possible class period or exposure to a disclosure. It tests a client's transactions against the challenged statements and omissions, accounts for corporate actions, security identifiers, partial sales and shifting class periods, and separates an estimated trading loss from the recoverable amount the evidence will support; case selection turns on the transaction history, the governing duty, causation, standing, traceability and recoverable loss. As a principal contact for many of the firm's public funds and other large investors, she advises on potential claims, recoveries, records preservation, a lead plaintiff's responsibilities, pleadings, discovery and settlement. For public-pension and Taft-Hartley clients she has made demands for books and records under Section 220 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, defining the purpose, negotiating the scope and evaluating what the records show about what a board knew, what its committees considered, how its controls operated and which transactions were documented, before the stockholder decides whether to act.

Suffolk, 1995

Stern graduated from American University with a degree in finance in 1991 and cum laude from Suffolk University Law School in 1995, where she served on the law review's editorial board and wrote three published pieces. She practiced general civil litigation before joining the firm in 1998. She is a partner in its Boston office, a member of its Executive Committee and co-chair of its Securities Practice Group, and she is admitted in Massachusetts, in the District of Massachusetts and before the First and Fourth Circuits. She has spoken at the Florida Public Pension Trustees Association's trustee schools, on SEC regulation in September 2013 and on "What You Don't Know Can Hurt You" in February 2015. She belongs to the Boston Bar Association, the National Association of Women Lawyers, the Women's Bar Association and the National Association of Public Pension Attorneys, and she coordinates the firm's support of the Greater Boston Food Bank. In March 2023 she co-wrote a Daily Journal article on shareholders demanding that companies' political action committee contributions align with their stated values, and on February 13, 2026 another, "Fake AI, real lawsuits: The market's newest bubble meets the courthouse."