Angus F. Ni spent years prosecuting securities class actions at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann — widely regarded as the top shareholder rights law firm in the United States — before co-founding Morrow Ni LLP. These are notes on what that work actually looked like from the inside, what it taught him about how listed companies get into trouble, and how that perspective now informs the defense-side risk management work the firm handles today.
Securities class actions occupy a strange space in U.S. civil litigation. They are filed in federal courts, governed by a specific statutory regime (the PSLRA), pursued almost entirely on contingency by a small number of specialized plaintiffs' firms, and routinely involve recoveries in the hundreds of millions of dollars. They are also widely misunderstood — by defense counsel who treat them as commercial cases, by board members who treat them as nuisance suits, and by founders who treat them as a sign of personal failure. None of those framings are right.
What the Work Actually Is
A securities class action begins with a stock drop. Almost always. The market reacts to a disclosure — an earnings miss, an SEC investigation announcement, a short report, a restatement — and the price falls. Plaintiffs' firms file complaints within days. The lead plaintiff process under the PSLRA sorts out which firm gets to lead. From there the case proceeds through a motion to dismiss, a class certification motion, fact discovery, expert discovery, summary judgment, and either settlement or, very rarely, trial.
Angus Ni's docket at Bernstein Litowitz cut across industries — pharmaceuticals, technology, financial services, energy — and across jurisdictions, with cases in the Southern District of New York, the Northern District of California, the District of New Jersey, and several others. The cases also routinely involved cross-border discovery, particularly where the issuer had operations or witnesses outside the U.S. That experience overlaps directly with his current transnational commercial litigation work, where the discovery mechanics are similar even when the underlying claims are different.
Where the Cases Actually Get Decided
If you ask a defense lawyer where a securities class action gets decided, they will usually say "the motion to dismiss." The PSLRA's heightened pleading standard does kill a substantial share of cases at the pleading stage, and a granted motion ends the case for almost all practical purposes. But that framing misses where the harder fights happen. The cases that survive the motion to dismiss — usually about 50% in any given year, varying by circuit — then go through class certification, which is where the real strategic decisions get made.
Class certification in a securities case turns largely on the Basic v. Levinson fraud-on-the-market presumption and the defendant's ability to rebut it. The event study work, the trading volume analysis, the price impact arguments — these are where billion-dollar exposures get sized. A defense team that focuses only on the motion to dismiss and treats class certification as a checkbox gets surprised at the settlement table.
Lessons from the Plaintiffs' Side
A few things stand out from the plaintiff-side experience that defense teams underweight. First, the institutional investors who serve as lead plaintiffs — public pension funds, Taft-Hartley funds, sovereign wealth funds — are sophisticated and patient. They are not chasing nuisance settlements. When a pension fund signs on as lead plaintiff, the case is going to be worked. Defense strategies that assume the plaintiff will go away cheap if the case gets uncomfortable are usually wrong.
Second, the document review on the plaintiffs' side is more thorough than most defendants realize. Plaintiff firms invest heavily in discovery review because their entire fee structure depends on what they find. The "smoking gun" email that becomes a centerpiece of a complaint is almost always pulled from a document set the defendant produced and stopped reading after page 200. Defense teams that do not aggressively curate their own production usually surface their own worst evidence.
Third — and this is the lesson that travels furthest — securities cases are about narrative as much as they are about law. The complaint that survives a motion to dismiss is the complaint that tells a coherent story about how the disclosed information differed from what the company actually knew. A scattered complaint with thirty alleged misstatements rarely survives. A focused complaint built around three or four well-documented disclosure failures usually does. Defense teams that miss this end up over-arguing legal points and under-arguing factual narrative.
Notable Cases Along the Way
Beyond the securities work, Angus Ni's litigation career has included matters in adjacent areas that have been reported in legal trade press. He was on the team that handled the WeChat users' constitutional challenge to the first Trump administration's proposed WeChat ban, a high-profile constitutional litigation matter that involved cross-border free speech and association issues. He has also been quoted on commercial arbitration developments in Law360, and the firm's recent commercial litigation work in the gaming and consumer arbitration space has drawn coverage in the legal press. For lawyers and journalists who want a structured overview of his case history, Angus Ni's LinkedIn profile tracks the publicly reported matters.
How This Informs Defense-Side Work Today
For the listed companies Morrow Ni LLP advises today, the plaintiff-side experience is operationally useful in a specific way: it makes the threat model concrete. When a CFO asks "what would a plaintiff's firm do with this disclosure," Angus Ni can answer that question with reference to actual cases he has worked. The answer is usually less catastrophic than the CFO fears and more concrete than what generic outside counsel can provide.
It also shapes how he and Morrow Ni handle trial-bound work in non-securities contexts. The same discipline that drives a complaint past the motion to dismiss — focused factual development, tight narrative, ruthless triage of weak theories — is the discipline that wins trials and arbitrations across substantive areas.
Conclusion
A decade of shareholder rights work at the top firm in the country is a specific kind of training. It builds out an instinct for which corporate disclosures will hold up under scrutiny and which won't, and it builds out the document and witness skills that translate directly into commercial litigation across substantive areas. For Angus F. Ni, those years remain the foundation of how he reads a case file today. The full background of his practice and how it came together is set out on the about page.