Shawn A. Williams

Four days after the call, the investors alleged, Apple cut iPhone production. On January 2, 2019 Apple told investors that revenue for the quarter would fall as much as $9 billion short of its guidance, attributing most of the shortfall to economic weakness and lower iPhone sales in Greater China, and its shares fell more than nine percent. The suits filed that year in the Northern District of California were consolidated as In re Apple Inc. Securities Litigation.

Two Months

Robbins Geller's first complaint, for the City of Roseville Employees' Retirement System in Michigan, pleaded a class period of about two months, from Cook's call to the January warning; another investor's complaint reached back more than two years, and under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act the court appointed that investor, the Employees' Retirement System of the State of Rhode Island, which claimed the larger loss. Williams's team asked to file additional briefing on Apple's motion to dismiss. On June 2, 2020 Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers dismissed most of the longer complaint, with leave to amend, and said she would reconsider the appointment of lead counsel; that month Robbins Geller became lead counsel for the investors, led by Norfolk County Council, the administering authority of the Norfolk Pension Fund, on the two-month period Williams has described as “tightly focused on the issue that caused investor losses.” On November 4, 2020 Judge Gonzalez Rogers held that the revised complaint “plausibly alleges that Cook represented that Apple was not experiencing pressure in China” and pleaded an inference of scienter “as compelling as any opposing inference.” She certified a class of purchasers of Apple common stock from November 2, 2018 through January 2, 2019 on February 4, 2022, and on March 28, 2023, after the lead plaintiff supplied further analysis of the options market, added the buyers of call options and the sellers of put options.

May 10, 2023

Williams argued the opposition to Apple's motion for summary judgment on May 10, 2023, on a record of competing expert opinions, a response to Apple's statement of undisputed facts and the exhibits, arranged around falsity, scienter and loss causation. On June 26 Judge Gonzalez Rogers denied the motion. “There is sufficient evidence from which a jury could find the Challenged Statement was about future performance,” she wrote; the defendants did “not dispute that Cook knew about the production and demand cuts in China”; and “A reasonable jury could find that failure to disclose these risks caused plaintiff's harm.” She held that the defendants had not shown that Luca Maestri, Apple's chief financial officer, was entitled to the good-faith defense to the control-person claim, and the case moved toward a jury trial, with Williams, Mark Solomon, Jason A. Forge, Daniel J. Pfefferbaum, Kenneth J. Black and Hadiya K. Deshmukh on the investors' team.

Newport Beach

At a status conference on January 23, 2024 the court discussed the trial schedule, and the parties reported that they were working with a mediator, Layn R. Phillips, a former federal judge. The sessions ran online and in Newport Beach, California, and in March 2024 Apple agreed to pay $490 million in cash, without admitting liability; the investors moved for preliminary approval on March 15, and the court granted it in June. The claims administrator sent 1,014,368 copies of the summary notice by mail and email; four valid requests for exclusion and one objection were filed. On September 18, 2024, after the settlement hearing the day before, Judge Gonzalez Rogers approved the settlement and the allocation among stock and options investors and entered judgment, in an order that credited “the skill and strategic vision, as well as the risk taken by plaintiffs' counsel.”

INFUSE

The Food and Drug Administration approved Medtronic's INFUSE, a bone morphogenetic protein, in 2002 for spinal fusion in the lower back, and every one of the thirteen articles reporting Medtronic's clinical trials had physician authors with financial interests in the product. In October 2012 the Senate Finance Committee's staff found that Medtronic “was heavily involved in drafting, editing, and shaping the content of medical journal articles” and had “recommended against publishing a complete list of adverse events associated with INFUSE.” Investors sued in the District of Minnesota on June 27, 2013, alleging that the articles underreported adverse events and that the deception inflated Medtronic's stock until the truth emerged in June 2011, and the district court granted summary judgment for Medtronic on the ground that the claims came too late. Williams led the appeal. On December 28, 2016 the Eighth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Raymond W. Gruender for a panel with Judges C. Arlen Beam and Bobby E. Shepherd, vacated the judgment: “a reasonably diligent plaintiff would not have discovered facts sufficient to plead scienter based on public information existing prior to June 27, 2011,” and the scienter “did not become apparent until October 2012 when the Senate Finance Committee released its findings.” The court also held that “Janus does not bar Appellants' scheme liability claim.” On remand Robbins Geller, as lead trial counsel, certified the class and defeated Medtronic's renewed motion for summary judgment, and on December 11, 2018, just before trial, Judge Michael J. Davis approved a $43 million settlement.

Tag Suggestions

Facebook's Tag Suggestions feature looked for faces in uploaded photographs to prompt users to tag the people in them, and users in Illinois alleged that Facebook had created and stored digital scans of their faces without the notice and consent the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act requires. Williams was among lead counsel in In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation before Judge James Donato of the Northern District of California, where Robbins Geller, Edelson and Labaton Sucharow were class counsel for the Facebook users in Illinois for whom the company had created and stored a face template after June 7, 2011. The litigation turned on how the facial-recognition system worked, on Article III injury and on where the processing took place; the Ninth Circuit affirmed the court's rulings on standing and class certification in 2019. Three days before a trial-setting conference the parties agreed to settle for $550 million, Facebook added $100 million, and on February 26, 2021 Judge Donato approved the $650 million fund, which would put at least $345 in the hands of each of the 1,571,608 class members who had filed claims.

Manhattan

Williams joined the firm that became Robbins Geller in 2000 and is a founding partner, the managing partner of its San Francisco office and a member of its Management Committee and its shareholder derivative practice group. He took his B.A. at the State University of New York at Albany in 1991 and his J.D. at the University of Illinois in 1995, and he is admitted in California and New York.

As lead counsel he recovered $75 million for investors in Alibaba's 2014 public offering, approved by Judge Richard H. DuBois of the San Mateo County Superior Court on May 17, 2019, on claims that the registration statement omitted the counterfeiting on Alibaba's platforms and a July 2014 meeting at which Chinese regulators warned its executives. Two of his cases concerned what life insurers told investors about unclaimed benefits: MetLife settled for $84 million over its disclosures about its use of the Social Security Death Master File, and Prudential settled for $33 million in 2016 over its reserves for those benefits, which it had raised with a $99 million pre-tax charge disclosed on November 2, 2011. As lead counsel he also recovered $75 million in the Krispy Kreme case and $38 million in the Cadence Design Systems case, and he led the team that investigated and drafted the securities claims over Wells Fargo's unauthorized customer accounts, which settled for $480 million.

Before joining the firm he spent five years as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, drafting complaints, interviewing witnesses and “presenting those cases to the grand jury and trying the cases” to New York City juries. Robbins Geller's lawyers include former prosecutors and federal defenders, Williams has said, and “when we say that we are preparing for trial, we really mean it.”