'I got so mad reading that complaint'
The 94-year-old federal judge who dismissed investors' lawsuits against analyst Mary Meeker blasted it as inflammatory.
©Associated Press
© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 23, 2001
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NEW YORK -- The closing bell rang early on lawsuits against high-profile Internet stock analyst Mary Meeker when they landed on the desk of a 94-year-old federal judge whose first job as a lawyer came on the cusp of the Great Depression.
"I got so mad reading that complaint," Judge Milton Pollack said in an interview Wednesday, a day after dismissing the lawsuits with a three-page memorandum, a mere flick of the finger in a courthouse where dismissals are usually accompanied by complex legal analysis.
Pollack was direct in the dismissal memorandum, saying six lawsuits, each more than 40 pages in length were a "rhetorical exercise in length and forensic embroidery."
He added that they were "hopelessly redundant, argumentative" and filled with "irrelevancy and inflammatory material."
"It's really an outrage," Pollack said of the language in weeks-old lawsuits blaming Meeker and her employer, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co., for the losses of investors in the collapse of Internet stocks.
Pollack, who turns 95 on Sept. 29, has been a federal judge since 1967, but his experience as a lawyer predates the Great Depression.
He started work two weeks before the stock market crashed in 1929 with a now defunct law firm that had about 300 stock brokerage clients.
History, as he sees it, keeps repeating itself, usually about every decade or so when the economy hits a wall.
In 1929, as now, a euphoria among investors preceded a catastrophic drop in portfolio values for some, leading to a wave of lawsuits brought by angry investors looking for someone to blame.
"The things that brought it about were the overreaching by this one, that one and the other one and the mad rush that went on here in the last couple of years. This is a recycling of the same thing that occurred back there," Pollack said.
Much the same thing happened just after World War I when a dramatic economic downturn -- a disaster as Pollack recalls it -- led to a flood of bankruptcies. Pollack has felt the pain himself.
"My family was right in the middle of it. My father was a clothing manufacturer. As he remarked at the time, it was the first bad year he ever had in business," Pollack said.
The emotions in the streets, though, must not invade the courts, certainly not without a set of proper facts to support them, Pollack said.
The judge said he was especially disturbed by harsh language directed at the defendants in the lawsuits.
In his ruling, he noted Meeker was "derogatorily dubbed as "the Internet Queen."'
Pollack wrote further that "market gossip pervades the endless stream of news organization tidbits" throughout the lawsuits.
Rather than relying on facts that could be proven before a jury, the lawsuits instead featured predictable "comments of the gamblers in the world's gaming pits depending on the season."
"They come during the inevitable sequel after market boom periods," he wrote.
Pollack on Wednesday said upset investors "had no business saying the nasty things they did."
"It doesn't increase their chances in court but gives them the feeling that the other people will run for cover." |
