Securities class actions are a strange breed of litigation. One group of shareholders (usually both present and former) sues the company (and thus all current shareholders) to recover damages for alleged management wrongdoing. Most often, shareholders recover pennies in the dollar and management misconduct is not deterred.

The real winners are plaintiff lawyers. An obscure 1990 legal opinion by a US Securities and Exchange Commission assistant general counsel asserts that shareholders cannot waive the right to file securities lawsuits. This in effect prevents shareholders from forgoing costly lawsuits, even though the Supreme Court found in two prior cases that customers could waive their rights to sue broker-dealers and agree instead to arbitration.