April 9, 2026
On April 6, 2026, Willkie filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on behalf of several former SEC officials and law professors in support of Defendant The Boeing Company’s petition for permission to appeal in In re The Boeing Company Aircraft Securities Litigation. This is one of the highest-profile securities cases pending in the country and plaintiffs claim damages in excess of $15 billion.
The brief argues that in granting class certification for plaintiffs, the lower court failed to conduct the rigorous review of plaintiffs’ proposed damages methodology mandated by the Supreme Court’s decisions in Comcast. Specifically, the brief explains how plaintiffs’ proposed damages methodology is inconsistent with their theories of liability, because plaintiffs’ expert relies on back-casting a constant dollar inflation from a series of corrective disclosures, but fails to account for (i) the fact that plaintiffs’ rely on materialization of the risk, in addition to corrective disclosures, to prove loss causation, (ii) evolving public information about Boeing over the course of the class period, and (iii) plaintiffs’ theory that repetition of the alleged misstatements changed the materiality of those statements over time.
The brief further highlights the potential far-reaching consequences of the lower court’s decision for securities class actions. Class certification is one of the few means by which an issuer can defeat a securities class action before being pressured into settlement by the prospect of a company-ending judgment at trial.
The Willkie team was led by partner Todd Cosenza and included partners Erica Ross and Brady Sullivan and associate Zheyan (Charlene) Ni.
