Shawn A. Williams

Securities Fraud Litigation & Class Actions

Williams specializes in bringing complex securities litigation against corporations, usually on behalf of large pension funds.

Last year, after almost a decade of hard-fought litigation, he finally settled a pension fund’s action against insurance giant Metlife for $84 million, plus $19 million more in fees and expenses. City of Westland Police & Fire Ret. Sys. v. Metlife Inc., 1:12-cv-00256 (S.D. N.Y., filed Jan. 12, 2012).

Currently, he is lead plaintiffs’ counsel in a case against Apple over misstatements the tech giant allegedly made about its business in China. Williams represents a pension fund from England. The class action was certified this February. In Re Apple Inc. Securities Litigation, 4:19-cv-02033 (N.D. Cal., filed April 16, 2019).

The class alleges that in the fall of 2018, Apple assured investors conditions in China were not hurting its business, even though the Trump administration was threatening to impose tariffs and China’s economy was declining for the first time in years, he said. Despite Apple’s assurances, “it turned out that things in China were going pretty poorly, and in January 2019, the company announced its first [earnings] miss in 15 years.”

Williams’ client in the case is the Norfolk County Council and its Norfolk Pension Fund. “This particular pension fund has some experience in these cases,” he noted. In fact, he won jury trial in a class action securities case on behalf of the fund in February 2019. Hsu v. Puma Biotechnology Inc., 8:15-cv-00865 (C.D. Cal., filed June 3, 2015).

He also represents the lead plaintiff in litigation against the virtual meeting company Zoom. The potential class action focuses on the discovery that Zoom meetings were allegedly not after all encrypted “end to end” as the company had boasted. “It’s a securities case because when the truth was disclosed, the stock price tanked,” Williams said. Drieu v. Zoom Video Communications Inc., 3:20-cv-02353 (N.D. Cal., filed April 7, 2020).

– Don DeBenedictis