It’s a Wall Street club that’s virtually unknown on Wall Street. It has no name or official membership list, and it meets only once a year, in locations such as Switzerland’s Lake Lucerne, Connecticut’s Litchfield County, and, this year, Versailles.
The attendees are top in-house lawyers for some of the world’s most powerful banks — people who sit at the table for decisions that can shape multibillion-dollar litigation tabs for the likes of Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Deutsche Bank AG and J P Morgan Chase & Co.
For this year’s meeting, in late May, the lawyers descended on Trianon Palace Versailles, a luxury hotel less than two kilometres from the palace of Louis XIV and adjacent to the royal park.
The gatherings, which were described by several people familiar with them who asked not to be identified, tend to feature discussions of nuts-and-bolts issues such as managing relationships with the board and whether compliance personnel should receive stock incentives.
This year, according to two of the people, some attendees arrived at the marble and gilded hotel primed to focus on a common scourge: class-action lawyers who seek billions of dollars from top banks for alleged market manipulations and related bad behavior. Eric Grossman, chief legal officer at Morgan Stanley, implored his confederates to hang together and resist the temptation to settle quickly.
Months before, Citigroup Inc’s general counsel, Rohan Weerasinghe, had made a decision that essentially forced several of the world’s biggest banks to pay a total of $1.9 billion to settle a class action over credit-default swaps. Investors, including the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association, claimed the banks had worked together to limit competition in the market, allowing them to earn extra profits.
When multiple banks are sued in a class action, it’s common for them to share information and coordinate their defences. But after years of practice, class-action lawyers have figured out a way to fracture these alliances. They reach a settlement with one bank, then ratchet up pressure on the others. Each bank knows that the last to settle will probably pay the heftiest price. That’s because of a legal theory called joint and several liability, in which a company found in court to be even partially to blame can end up on the hook for all the damages.
In the swaps case, Citigroup broke first, agreeing in the summer of 2015 to pay $60 million. Others followed, with J PMorgan Chase & Co settling last for $595 million. Looming over the banks was the possibility of an antitrust investigation of the swaps market by the European Union (EU), which could have uncovered evidence that would then be available to the class-action plaintiffs. In the end, the EU closed its case, so the banks might have been better off waiting.
The annual gathering, whose existence hasn’t previously been reported, is the brainchild of lawyer Robert Mundheim. A general counsel for the US Department of the Treasury in the 1970s, Mundheim is now with the firm Shearman & Sterling and has been hired by independent directors of Wells Fargo to investigate the bank’s retail sales practices and other matters. Bloomberg
