Mark C. Molumphy
Securities Fraud · Shareholder Rights · Governance · Trial Readiness
It was clear we were ready and willing to try the case.
Line 132
On the evening of September 9, 2010, a thirty-inch natural-gas transmission pipe called Line 132 ruptured under a residential street in San Bruno, a few miles from the office where Mark Molumphy has practiced since 1993. The explosion and fire killed eight people and destroyed thirty-eight homes. Molumphy and Frank Pitre represented a shareholder who sued PG&E's directors and officers on the company's behalf, on the theory that the board's oversight of the gas system had failed and that the loss belonged to the corporation. The settlement, approved on April 21, 2017, paid PG&E $90 million in unrestricted funds and bound it to governance measures directed at the safety of its underground transmission lines. Five years later the firm did the same work for the victims of PG&E's fires: after the 2017 North Bay fires and the 2018 Camp Fire, the Fire Victim Trust created in PG&E's bankruptcy held the company's claims against its former directors and officers, and in 2022, with Pitre and Molumphy as its counsel, the Trust recovered $117 million from their insurers.
The Wells Fargo case was about who the bank interviewed and who it lent to. In 2022 The New York Times reported that Wells Fargo had conducted sham interviews with Black and other minority candidates for jobs that had already been filled, and Bloomberg reported the same year that in 2020 the bank had approved fewer than half of the refinancing applications from Black homeowners while approving most from white ones. Shareholder Amy Isenberg and others sued the directors on the company's behalf, and Molumphy and Tyson Redenbarger were co-lead counsel in In re Wells Fargo & Co. Consolidated Derivative Shareholder Litigation in the Northern District of California. On May 15, 2026, Judge Trina L. Thompson approved a $110 million settlement: $100 million for a Borrower Assistance Fund to help low- and moderate-income homeowners with their mortgages, and $10 million from the directors' insurers paid to the bank. "When I see gold standard, I know it when I see it," she said from the bench, "and this is it."
Eve of Trial in Santa Ana
Medical Capital raised money from about ten thousand investors, many of them retirees, through notes backed by medical receivables, and it was a Ponzi scheme. When it collapsed in 2009 the investors' strongest remaining claims ran through the banks that had served as indenture trustees for the notes, and Molumphy led the case against Wells Fargo for releasing investor funds from the trust accounts it was supposed to guard. He defeated the bank's motions for summary judgment and built the record for a federal jury: the bank's own account records, the chronology of the transfers, the trustee's communications, the witnesses and the damages. On April 30, 2013, after three years of litigation, Wells Fargo settled for $105 million on the eve of trial. The Bank of New York Mellon had already paid $114 million, and the two trustee settlements came to $219 million for the noteholders.
The same preparation ran through his other investor cases. In the Oracle derivative litigation he persuaded the federal court, on a question no court had decided, to strike down a forum-selection clause the board had written into the bylaws without a shareholder vote. In Apple Inc. v. Superior Court he represented the shareholders in the published California decision on what a complaint must plead, and what documents it may rely on, to show that a demand on the directors would have been futile. In the Uber initial-public-offering litigation, which settled for $200 million in August 2024 before Chief Judge Richard Seeborg, he was co-lead counsel in the parallel state action and coordinated the offering-document claims across the two courts. He was co-lead counsel in the Apple device-performance litigation, which paid $500 million to iPhone owners whose phones Apple had slowed by software update, and in the Zoom privacy litigation, which paid $85 million and changed the company's practices, and he led the Safelite whistleblower case, in which the auto-glass company paid $31 million in 2025 over years of overbilling insurers. His first recognition came earlier than any of them: the Jack Berman Advocacy Center of the American Jewish Congress gave him its Community Service Award in 1996 for his work in the litigation over the 101 California Street shootings.
Two Weeks in March
Pampena v. Musk went to a jury in Judge Charles R. Breyer's courtroom in San Francisco on March 2, 2026. The plaintiffs were investors who had sold Twitter stock, or traded its options, between May 13 and October 4, 2022, the months in which Elon Musk, having agreed on April 25 to buy the company for $54.20 a share, said publicly that the deal was "temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users." The stock fell to $32.52, forty percent below the deal price, and the plaintiffs alleged that the bot statements were a pretext to drive the price down and renegotiate. Molumphy was lead trial counsel, with Joseph Cotchett beside him; Musk testified for a day and a half. Musk's tweets, Molumphy told the jury, "were not some innocent mistakes, some stupid tweet that he didn't consider. They were intentional, deliberate, and devised to convey to investors that Twitter was overrun with spam." After two weeks of testimony and three days of deliberation, on March 20, 2026, the jury found that Musk had knowingly misled Twitter's investors with the May 13 statement, and fixed the damages at $2.98 to $8.44 a share depending on the day of the trade, which the plaintiffs' lawyers estimated at $2.6 billion across the class. On July 6, 2026, Judge Breyer let the verdict on that statement stand. "Buyer's remorse," he wrote, "is not an exception to the securities laws."
Molumphy was born in San Mateo, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989 with a year of international relations and economics at the University of Edinburgh, and took his law degree from the University of San Francisco in 1993, the year he joined Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy. He is a partner in the Burlingame office, heads the firm's securities and privacy practices, and is admitted in California, before the Supreme Court of the United States and the Ninth Circuit, and in all four federal districts of the state. He sits on the board of the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County, coaches for the Special Olympics and serves on the board of Bay Scholars, which supports low-income students in the Bay Area. His cases have returned more than a billion dollars to investors, corporations and consumers, and the Twitter verdict is the one that went to a jury.
