Spencer A. Burkholz

Household International

Jaffe v. Household International became one of the relatively rare federal securities class actions to reach a jury. Burkholz was one of the lead trial lawyers in the six-week 2009 trial concerning the consumer-finance company’s lending practices and financial reporting.

That trial required the team to organize years of documents, witness testimony, market evidence, and expert analysis addressing corporate disclosures, lending operations, investor reliance, causation, and damages into a sequence the jury could evaluate.

The jury found for the investor class, and the district court entered an initial judgment of approximately $2.46 billion. Appellate review later returned defined loss-causation and statement-attribution issues for retrial. Burkholz and the trial team prepared those issues for a second jury proceeding.

Before retrial, the parties agreed to a $1.575 billion settlement after fourteen years of litigation. The court granted final approval in 2016.

Countrywide Mortgage-Backed Securities

In Luther v. Countrywide, public pension and retirement funds challenged offering materials used to sell securities backed by residential loans, alleging departures from stated underwriting standards. Robbins Geller and Kessler Topaz served as co-lead counsel.

The litigation covered multiple actions, offerings, pension-fund plaintiffs, loan pools, originators, and underwriters. Burkholz’s team connected loan-level origination and review practices to the representations governing particular mortgage-backed certificates, tracing how loans were originated, sampled, reviewed, pooled, described, rated, and sold.

Lead plaintiffs participated in mediation with experienced neutrals, and several pension funds and a bank served among the investor representatives pursuing the national claims.

After five years of litigation, the parties agreed to a $500 million settlement, which the district court approved in December 2013. The recovery required offering-level analysis, loan-pool evidence, investor transactions, expert work, class administration, and allocation across covered securities.

Wells Fargo

Burkholz was part of the Robbins Geller team representing Construction Laborers Pension Trust for Southern California in investor litigation over Wells Fargo’s disclosures about auto-loan customers charged for collision insurance they did not need. The investors alleged that Wells Fargo knew of the issue, did not disclose it to investors, and that the added charges caused loan delinquencies and more than 20,000 vehicle repossessions.

A 2017 report disclosed findings from an internal review, and Wells Fargo later stated that it had known about the issue earlier. The investor theory required counsel to align the customer-practice chronology with corporate knowledge, public statements, later disclosures, and stock-price movement, then address materiality and compensable market loss.

Discovery produced more than 505,000 pages of documents, nineteen fact-witness depositions, and 152 pages of admissions and sworn interrogatory responses. The court certified the investor class on August 15, 2022.

As the case approached trial, the parties exchanged trial exhibits and began preparing deposition designations, proposed jury instructions, and verdict forms. The court approved a $300 million settlement on September 26, 2023.

McKesson and Envision Healthcare

Burkholz served as lead counsel in McKesson investor litigation alleging that the drug distributor concealed that its financial results benefited from a price-fixing scheme among generic-drug suppliers. Pension Trust Fund for Operating Engineers served as lead plaintiff. The court approved a $141 million settlement in July 2023 after nearly five years of litigation.

The McKesson record crossed pharmaceutical pricing, wholesale distribution, regulatory developments, public disclosures, investor transactions, and market-loss evidence. Burkholz directed the evidence, strategy, client coordination, and resolution for the investor side.

Envision Healthcare concerned allegations that the company depended on out-of-network emergency-care charges and did not adequately disclose how that revenue supported reported growth. Discovery produced more than 3.2 million pages of documents and fifty-nine fact and expert depositions.

The court granted final approval to a $177.5 million settlement on March 21, 2024.

Additional Securities Work

Burkholz appeared for consolidated plaintiffs in In re Enron Corp. Securities Litigation, which produced $7.2 billion in settlements. In In re WorldCom Securities Litigation, he was among the lawyers representing institutional investors in individual actions that recovered more than $657 million. He served as lead plaintiffs’ counsel in the Cisco Systems securities litigation, which resolved for more than $90 million. His additional securities work includes Qwest, Cardinal Health, and CBS.

His practice spans document development, expert proof, client coordination, class procedure, trial preparation, and settlement administration across several generations of major securities litigation.

Firm Leadership

Known professionally as “Spence,” Burkholz is a Robbins Geller partner and Management Committee member. He coordinates lawyers, experts, technology, client communication, and trial preparation in long-running investor matters while continuing to litigate major cases.

He earned his B.A. from Clark University and his J.D. from the University of Virginia in 1989. He is admitted in California and several federal appellate courts.