Robbins Geller is one of the country’s most expansive and most ubiquitous plaintiff firms, with a national footprint through nine offices spanning New York (Manhattan and Melville, Long Island), Boca Raton, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Diego, Nashville, Chicago and Washington, DC. The firm also is known (by both plaintiff and defense counsel peers) for being not only one of the most prolific filers of cases, but also one of the most willing to take these cases to significant degrees of litigation. “We see Robbins Geller all the time, constantly,” confirms a defense-side peer, “and they are formidable opponents. We fight and scream at each other, but there is nothing but respect in the end.”
In one such example of the firm’s chutzpah, Tor Gronborg and Daniel Drosman of the firm’s San Diego scored big in the role of co-lead counsel for the National Elevator Industry Pension Fund in a landmark securities fraud class action against Twitter (now “X”) brought by the client and other investors of the social-media platform. The matter regards allegations that Twitter misled shareholders by concealing stagnant growth among its user base, artificially inflating its stock price. Drosman and Gronborg have, after five years of hard-fought litigation, successfully negotiated a whopping settlement of $809.5 million. This triumph, which earned the firm an “Impact Case” and “Plaintiff Firm of the Year” award at the Benchmark awards ceremony in March 2022, had entire securities bar talking. “I’ll be honest,” asserts one peer. “Another plaintiff firm could tagged Twitter for $100 million,
maybe $200 million. Robbins Geller is the only one that could have gotten a settlement like that out of them, and that’s because they are a credible trial threat.” Speaking specifically to Gronborg’s profile, a well known securities defense counsel insists, “Tor is good, he knows his stuff. He’s not a flashy guy and doesn’t get the limelight as much, but he should because this is where the brains are.”
Jason Forge, also in San Diego, led the prosecution of a securities fraud case against Alphabet on behalf of investors concerning a data breach due to a software glitch in Alphabet’s Google+ platform that gave third-party developers access to private user information, which, when publicly disclosed, caused a precipitous drop in the company’s share price and harmed investors. The case was considered a risky bet because the court dismissed the investors’ case in 2020, but Forge appealed and won, securing a $350 million settlement in April 2024. Spencer Burkholz and
Darren Robbins achieved a $177.5 million settlement in March 2024 in a securities fraud case against Envision Healthcare, which is alleged to have employed a strategy of staffing emergency departments with out-of-network physicians, resulting in exorbitant charges for emergency-room visits and often saddling patients with costly and unexpected “balance bills.” Plaintiffs alleged that Envision concealed from investors the extent of their reliance on these unsustainable out-of-network revenues that were the key drivers of Envision’s profits and growth.
