Thomas A. Dubbs

Amgen: A Supreme Court Rule and $95 Million

Connecticut’s retirement plans served as lead plaintiff in the Amgen securities litigation, and Dubbs helped carry the matter to the Supreme Court and through the years of litigation that followed. The question presented reached the architecture of every fraud-on-the-market class action: whether investors must prove the materiality of a misstatement before a class can be certified, or whether materiality belongs to the merits.

In 2013, the Court held that securities plaintiffs need not prove materiality at the certification stage. Because materiality is judged by an objective, reasonable-investor standard, it stands or falls for every class member at once; a failure of proof would end the case for everyone rather than splinter it into individual claims. The ruling preserved collective treatment without importing a merits trial into certification, and it now governs class practice nationwide.

After nearly a decade of litigation, the matter concluded with a $95 million settlement. The result joined a rule of national application with a funded recovery for the investors who fought for it.

Goldman Sachs and Repeated Certification Review

Goldman Sachs presented another certification boundary: whether allegedly generic statements about conflicts management and business integrity could maintain price inflation, and how that question bears on the Basic presumption of reliance. Dubbs served as lead counsel for the investor team through repeated certification orders and appeals. In 2020, he described the Second Circuit’s affirmance as clearing the way toward trial.

The litigation became a proving ground for the price-impact inquiry. Each round of review returned the case with a refined legal standard, and each time Dubbs’s team re-established the evidentiary record that certification required. After the Supreme Court clarified how courts must weigh the generic character of a statement against evidence of price impact, the district court again certified the class. His leadership preserved the investor team’s evidentiary framework across multiple appeals and kept the case positioned for classwide adjudication.

Fannie Mae: $170 Million

Boston Retirement System alleged that Fannie Mae and two former officers misled investors about internal controls and exposure to subprime and other risky mortgage products. Dubbs led the Labaton team representing the retirement system.

The litigation demanded a discipline of separation. The plaintiffs had to distinguish company-specific disclosures and market effects from the broader financial crisis unfolding around them, so the team developed the disclosure chronology, the internal-control allegations, the company-specific events, the price movement, and the expert analysis that isolated Fannie’s own statements from the general decline.

That record allowed the client and the court to evaluate the company’s representations and corrective events on their own terms, apart from the surrounding mortgage-market collapse. The parties agreed to a $170 million settlement in 2014.

Bristol-Myers Squibb: $185 Million and Disclosure Reforms

Dubbs led a team representing an affiliate of Amalgamated Bank in securities litigation against Bristol-Myers Squibb. The case resolved for $185 million together with corporate-governance reforms whose reach extended well beyond the class.

Bristol-Myers agreed to publish information about clinical trials, results, safety issues, and adverse events on its website. The agreement identified the information to be published and established an ongoing public reporting practice in addition to the cash recovery — implementing features of proposed federal legislation that Congress had not passed.

The result gave patients and physicians access to material information about the company’s drugs. A claim that began with shareholder disclosure produced a durable mechanism of public disclosure, joining a funded investor recovery with continuing operational transparency about clinical research and safety.

Additional Securities Recoveries

Dubbs’s Labaton matters have also included AIG, Bear Stearns, HealthSouth, Broadcom, WellCare, and Goldman Sachs. The AIG litigation produced settlements totaling more than $1 billion. Bear Stearns and its outside auditor produced $294.9 million — $275 million from the company and $19.9 million from Deloitte & Touche. HealthSouth produced $671 million; WellCare produced more than $200 million; and Broadcom and its auditor produced $173.5 million.

Each of those matters carried its own issuer-specific allegations, accounting or operating records, discovery, expert analysis, trial preparation, negotiation, and judicial review of the resulting agreement. Together they trace a practice built case by case on the evidence particular funds and investors could prove.

Morrison and Appellate Practice

Thomas A. Dubbs stood before the Supreme Court on March 29, 2010, as counsel of record for foreign investors who had bought National Australia Bank shares outside the United States. The bank — then the largest in Australia — had acquired HomeSide Lending, a Florida mortgage servicer, and later announced write-downs of $450 million and then $1.75 billion after recalculating the value of HomeSide’s mortgage-servicing rights. The investors alleged that deceptive conduct at the Florida subsidiary inflated the parent company’s financial results.

Those foreign purchases forced the Court to decide, for the first time, whether Section 10(b)’s private remedy reached such transactions. The case placed conduct, issuer, purchasers, exchange, and alleged market effect in different countries, and Dubbs asked the Court to decide which of those connections controlled the statute’s reach.

The decision established the transaction-based rule that now governs private Exchange Act claims worldwide. Dubbs later examined its textual method in scholarship, including an article for the Southwestern Journal of International Law reappraising the opinion’s analysis, and he has written on the transaction-specific inquiry the decision imposes on public pension funds and other investors with foreign holdings.

Dubbs has argued before the Supreme Court and in ten securities or commodities appeals before the federal courts of appeals. His appellate work has addressed statutory reach, class procedure, causation, and the connection between legal doctrine and developed investor records.

Defense, In-House, and Investor Experience

Before joining Labaton Keller Sucharow, Dubbs served as senior litigation counsel at Kidder, Peabody, where he represented the company in class actions and tried securities matters. Earlier, he led a law-firm litigation department and represented Thomson McKinnon Securities. That defense and in-house experience placed him inside the decision-making, trial choices, and risk assessments he would later encounter from the other side of the caption.

At Labaton, he is a partner representing public pension funds and other institutional investors in domestic and multinational securities litigation. His earlier work gave him direct familiarity with the factual, procedural, expert, settlement, and appellate arguments raised against investor claims — challenges to scienter, causation, class treatment, and damages — long before he answered them for plaintiffs.

Dubbs is admitted in New York, the Supreme Court, five federal courts of appeals, and the Southern District of New York. He serves as a FINRA arbitrator, has participated in American Law Institute projects concerning conflicts of laws, foreign relations, and aggregate litigation, and lectures frequently to institutional investors, including the Government Finance Officers Association, the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems, and the Council of Institutional Investors.

He earned bachelor’s and law degrees from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.