Richard M. Heimann

Philadelphia First

Heimann began as a deputy public defender in Philadelphia and later served as an assistant district attorney. The defender's office taught him the lesson that shaped everything after: it was not the guilty clients who kept him up at night, but the innocent ones, and the grinding difficulty of achieving justice for them inside the system.

From that foundation he built a civil practice at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein — the firm that carries his name — where he supervises the securities and financial fraud practice and has long served as its lead trial attorney. He also supervised the firm's landmark tobacco litigation on behalf of Massachusetts, California, and several other states, resolved in 1998 as part of the record $206 billion master settlement agreement with the state attorneys general.

Verdicts Built From the Stand

FPI/Agretech arose from limited partnerships formed to cultivate and sell tropical plants in Hawaii. The enterprise collapsed after several thousand investors had purchased interests and collectively lost more than $50 million. The federal cases were consolidated in the District of Hawaii, where Lieff Cabraser and local counsel held co-lead and co-liaison roles, and Heimann tried the consolidated securities class action — connecting offering materials, partnership structures, professional services, the movement of investor money, and the losses that followed the collapse.

He also tried Edsaco before a federal jury in San Francisco, a month-long securities trial built on live testimony, accounting and disclosure evidence, and expert examination. His trial docket extends across practice areas: the Wells Fargo overdraft-fees consumer class action and the LCD price-fixing antitrust class action both went to verdict with Heimann at the plaintiffs' table.

Broadcom: $197 Million in Corporate Value

In 2006, the federal court overseeing Broadcom's stock-option-backdating derivative litigation appointed Heimann lead federal derivative plaintiffs' counsel. The consolidated action alleged that historical option-grant practices had harmed Broadcom and forced a restatement of its financial results.

The resolution came in two movements. A 2009 partial settlement required directors-and-officers insurers to pay Broadcom $118 million while preserving claims against three former executives outside the release — an immediate insured recovery that did not end the case. The preserved claims then produced a separate 2011 settlement: cash and canceled options valued at more than $53 million, plus a former officer's release of a claim against the company seeking more than $26 million. Together, the components delivered approximately $197 million in corporate value.

Wells Fargo: The $240 Million Settlement

The Wells Fargo derivative action followed disclosures that employees had opened millions of deposit and credit-card accounts without customer authorization in pursuit of cross-selling targets. Shareholders alleged failures of board and senior-officer oversight.

The Northern District of California appointed the Fire and Police Pension Association of Colorado and the City of Birmingham Retirement and Relief System as co-lead plaintiffs, with Lieff Cabraser and Saxena White as co-lead counsel; Heimann led Lieff Cabraser's work. The court largely denied a demand-futility dismissal motion in May 2017 and again denied dismissal in large part that October, sending the oversight theories forward.

Resolution took seven mediation sessions — three early, then four day-long sessions supervised by retired Judge Daniel Weinstein and mediator Jed Melnick — before the parties accepted Judge Weinstein's proposal in December 2018. Final approval came in April 2020.

Directors-and-officers insurers paid $240 million to Wells Fargo, the largest insurer-funded derivative settlement in history at the time. The litigation period also saw the board claw back $122.5 million through stock-grant forfeitures, reduced compensation, and returned incentive pay, alongside changes to board and business-unit oversight, internal controls, internal reporting, leadership structure, and risk-management reporting. Heimann's co-lead responsibilities ran from the pleadings through discovery, mediation, settlement terms, shareholder notice, objections, and final judicial review.

Boeing: Safety Wired Into the Bylaws

Heimann appeared for co-lead plaintiffs in Boeing's Delaware shareholder derivative litigation after the two 737 MAX crashes, on claims that the board had failed to establish and use systems for monitoring airplane safety and failed to respond to warning signs after the first crash.

The 2022 settlement required directors-and-officers insurers to pay Boeing $237.5 million. Its governance terms rebuilt the board's relationship to safety itself: a five-year ombudsperson program for internal safety concerns, an additional director with aviation, engineering, or product-safety oversight experience, bylaw separation of the chief executive and board-chair roles, specified board expertise, mandatory reporting to the aerospace safety committee, and public disclosure of safety-enhancement programs.

Current Practice

Heimann is a partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein in San Francisco. His practice spans securities and investor fraud, shareholder derivative litigation, antitrust, consumer protection, and complex trials — a range he counts among the rewards of the work. The cases are never the same twice; in his words, you find yourself "recreating the wheel every time."

He earned a business degree with honors from the University of Florida in 1969 and his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1972, where he served on the Georgetown Law Journal.