Spencer A. Burkholz

The investors alleged that Household, the Illinois consumer lender, together with its chief executive William Aldinger, its chief financial officer David Schoenholz and Gary Gilmer, who headed its consumer-lending group, had misrepresented its lending practices, the quality of its loan portfolio and its financial results. Trial opened before Judge Ronald A. Guzmán on March 30, 2009, with Burkholz, Michael J. Dowd, Daniel S. Drosman and Luke O. Brooks trying the case for the class, and on May 7 the jury found that the defendants had made seventeen false and misleading statements in violation of Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and SEC Rule 10b-5. The lead plaintiffs were Glickenhaus & Co., the PACE Industry Union-Management Pension Fund and the International Union of Operating Engineers Local No. 132 Pension Plan. In June 2016 HSBC Finance Corporation, Household's successor after HSBC acquired the company in March 2003, agreed to pay $1.575 billion in cash, and James Glickenhaus said, "The mills of Justice grind slowly, but sometimes they do grind exceedingly fine."

Burkholz's declaration supporting the settlement ran about 150 pages, as Dowd told the court. At the October hearing Judge Alonso said, "Every factor in the Court's analysis of this settlement strongly favors approval," called the recovery "a spectacular result for the class" and described "a thorny case in which the state of the law has been and is in flux." He noted that 33,871 class members had accepted claims and that one had objected.

Pass-Through Certificates

David Luther's class action, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court for investors who bought Countrywide mortgage pass-through certificates between January 2005 and June 2007, alleged that the registration statements and prospectus supplements misrepresented the underwriting standards and origination practices behind the loans. After Countrywide removed the case to federal court and the district court sent it back, Joseph D. Daley of Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, as Robbins Geller was then named, defended the remand on appeal, and on July 16, 2008 the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Class Action Fairness Act's "general grant of the right of removal of high-dollar class actions does not trump § 22(a)'s specific bar to removal of cases arising under the Securities Act of 1933."

The claims later proceeded in federal court in Los Angeles before Judge Mariana R. Pfaelzer, in actions brought by Luther, the Maine State Retirement System and the Western Conference of Teamsters Pension Plan. The lead plaintiffs included the Vermont Pension Investment Committee, the Maine State Retirement System, the Pension Trust Fund for Operating Engineers, the Washington State Plumbing & Pipefitting Pension Trust, Mashreqbank and Luther, and Robbins Geller and Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check served as co-lead counsel. Burkholz, Scott H. Saham and Thomas E. Egler were the Robbins Geller lawyers responsible for the settlement, and Burkholz's team connected loan-level origination and review practices to the representations governing particular certificates. On December 6, 2013 Judge Pfaelzer found the $500 million settlement "fair, reasonable and adequate."

Collateral Protection

On July 27, 2017, The New York Times reported that a review by the consulting firm Oliver Wyman, prepared for Wells Fargo's executives, had found that more than 800,000 people who took out car loans from the bank had been charged for collateral protection insurance they did not need; the added premiums could have pushed about 274,000 of them into delinquency and led to nearly 25,000 wrongful repossessions. Burkholz was on the Robbins Geller team for the Construction Laborers Pension Trust for Southern California, lead plaintiff in Purple Mountain Trust v. Wells Fargo & Co. before Judge James Donato in San Francisco. The investors alleged that Wells Fargo knew of the practice, and of its failure to refund unearned guaranteed auto protection premiums to tens of thousands of customers, and kept both from shareholders who bought between November 3, 2016 and August 3, 2017.

Discovery yielded more than 505,000 pages of documents, nineteen fact-witness depositions and 152 pages of admissions and sworn interrogatory responses. Judge Donato certified the class on August 15, 2022, and as trial approached the parties exchanged trial exhibits and began preparing deposition designations, proposed jury instructions and verdict forms. Wells Fargo agreed to pay $300 million, and the court approved the settlement on September 26, 2023.

McKesson and Cordis

Burkholz was lead counsel for the Pension Trust Fund for Operating Engineers in Evanston Police Pension Fund v. McKesson Corp., which alleged that the drug distributor attributed generic-drug price inflation to supply disruptions when collusion among suppliers was the cause, described the generic market as competitive and did not disclose that its results benefited from collusive pricing. On October 30, 2019 Judge Charles R. Breyer wrote that the lead plaintiff "has adequately plead the required elements of its Rule 10(b) claim, including falsity, scienter, and loss causation." Burkholz later said the case was hard to research and to build a strategy for because "there were so many drugs at issue." McKesson paid $141 million under a settlement Judge Breyer approved in July 2023.

He was also lead counsel for the 1199SEIU Health Care Employees Pension Fund, appointed lead plaintiff in June 2020, in the case over Cardinal Health's 2015 purchase of the Cordis medical-device business from Johnson & Johnson. The complaint alleged that Cardinal told investors it had done proper due diligence, was applying its supply-chain expertise to Cordis and held adequate reserves for obsolete inventory, while internal reports showed hundreds of millions of dollars of obsolete Cordis inventory and a period in which that inventory could not be tracked. On September 27, 2021 Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. found that the allegations "give rise to the strong inference of scienter required by Tellabs," and Cardinal Health's $109 million settlement was approved on September 13, 2023.

San Diego

Burkholz graduated cum laude from Clark University in 1985 and received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1989. Known professionally as “Spence,” he is a partner in Robbins Geller's San Diego office and a member of the firm's Executive and Management Committees. The first major case he led was the Cisco Systems securities litigation for investors who bought between November 10, 1999 and February 6, 2001, resolved in August 2006 for $91.75 million paid by the insurers of Cisco and its directors and officers. He appeared for consolidated plaintiffs in In re Enron Corp. Securities Litigation, which produced $7.2 billion in settlements, and in In re WorldCom Securities Litigation he was among the lawyers representing institutional investors in individual actions that recovered more than $657 million. His securities work also includes Qwest and CBS. He is admitted in California, in the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second, Third, Seventh and Ninth Circuits and in the Northern, Central and Southern Districts of California.

Out of Network

Envision Healthcare's EmCare unit staffed hospital emergency departments. The investors' suit, filed in Nashville on August 4, 2017, alleged that EmCare routinely arranged for patients at in-network hospitals to be treated by out-of-network physicians, whose higher charges and balance bills produced revenue growth the company attributed to other causes. Burkholz represented the Laborers Pension Trust Fund for Northern California and the LIUNA funds appointed lead plaintiffs on October 27, 2017, and in November 2019 Judge William L. Campbell Jr. held that they had "sufficiently alleged facts that raise a plausible inference that out-of-network billing was a significant source of revenue."

The parties produced more than 3.2 million pages of documents and took fifty-nine fact and expert depositions. KKR had acquired Envision in 2018, and on May 15, 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11 protection in the Southern District of Texas, a filing Burkholz said "threatened to extinguish our case." With former federal judge Layn R. Phillips mediating, the parties reached agreement on August 29, 2023, and on March 21, 2024 Judge Campbell approved the $177.5 million settlement for investors who bought Envision stock between February 3, 2014 and October 31, 2017.