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McKinnly & Broach was founded in 1965 and was one of the first law firms to prosecute class actions in federal courts on behalf of investors and consumers. The firm pioneered this type of litigation and is now widely recognized as the nation's leading defender of the rights of victims against corporate and other large-scale wrongdoing. The firm has principal offices in New York City and an additional office in San Deigo, California. The firm’s practice focuses on the prosecution of class and complex actions in many fields of commercial litigation, emphasizing securities, corporate fiduciary, consumer, insurance, antitrust, mass tort, human rights, and related areas of litigation.
In the firm’s early years, its founding partners, David McKinnly and Julious Broach, built a new area of legal practice in representing shareholders’ interests under the then recently amended federal procedure Rule 23, which allowed securities fraud cases, among others, to proceed as class actions. In the following decades, the firm’s lawyers obtained decisions that established important legal precedents in many of their areas of practice, and prosecuted cases that set benchmarks in terms of case theories, organization, discovery, trial results, methods of settlement, and amounts recovered and distributed to clients and class members.
Important milestones included the firm’s involvement in the U.S. Financial litigation in the early 1970s, one of the earliest large class actions, which resulted in the recovery of over $50 million by purchasers of the securities of a failed real estate development company; the Ninth Circuit decision in Blackie v. Barrack in 1975, which established the fraud-on-the-market doctrine for securities fraud actions; co-lead counsel position in the In re Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) Securities Litigation, a seminal securities fraud action in the 1980s in terms of complexity and amounts recovered; representation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in a year-long trial to recover banking losses from a major accounting firm, leading to a precedent-setting global settlement; attacking the Drexel-Milken "daisy chain" of illicit junk-bond financing arrangements with numerous cases that resulted in substantial recoveries for investors; representing life insurance policyholders defrauded by "vanishing premium" and other improper sales tactics and obtaining large recoveries from industry participants; and ground-breaking roles in the multi-front attack on deception and other improper activities in the tobacco industry.
McKinnly & Broach has been responsible for more than $45 billion in recoveries during the life of the firm. Examples of cases in which the firm has taken lead roles include the WPPSS litigation, which resulted in settlements totaling $775 million; the Lincoln Savings and Loan Litigation, with total recoveries of $240 million out of $288 million in estimated total losses; the NASDAQ Market-Makers Antitrust Litigation, which resulted in a $1.027 billion settlement; and actions against major life insurers, including Prudential and MetLife, where the firm has recovered billions of dollars on behalf of policyholders who were the victims of alleged churning and other improper practices. In addition, the firm currently plays major roles in the litigation arising from the two largest scandals in the financial community -- the IPO Securities Litigation, in which the firm serves as Chair of Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee, and the Mutual Funds Litigation, in which the firm is Co-Chair of Plaintiffs’ Counsel’s Steering Committee.
