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Julia Alonzo

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Julia Alonzo is the Litigation Department Legal Director.  She works closely with the department’s co-chairs to manage its business and operations, and works with the entire department to execute on its strategic plan.  As a long-time Proskauer lawyer, and an accomplished member of its Litigation Department,  Julia has taken on an additional firm-wide leadership role that focuses on building a community that  provides fair opportunities for women attorneys across all departments and at all stages of their careers.

Julia also serves on the Firm’s Hiring Committee and Summer Program Committee.

Until 2024, Julia was a Senior Counsel in Proskauer’s Litigation Department, with a focus on securities, corporate governance, and restructuring litigation.

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On December 11, 2020, the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari in a shareholder securities litigation against Goldman Sachs.[1] On appeal, Goldman argues that federal securities law permits issuer defendants in purported class actions to rebut the presumption of reliance where the alleged misstatements are of such a generic…

Last week, the Ninth Circuit issued a decision that could affect analyses of corporate scienter in securities class actions. The court reversed the dismissal of In re ChinaCast Education Corporation Securities Litigation and held that a malfeasant executive’s knowledge could be imputed to his or her company when the executive acted with apparent authority. The court also observed that, “as a practical matter,” the adverse-interest exception presumptively does not apply in fraud-on-the-market securities class actions.

As we have previously discussed, there has been a growing trend of corporations’ adopting various types of bylaws to define the bounds of shareholder litigation. These include forum-selection bylaws (see here) and fee-shifting bylaws (now prohibited in Delaware for stock corporations as discussed here). A novel approach, utilized by at least three Florida corporations, is a minimum-stake-to-sue bylaw that requires shareholders to hold a certain minimum percentage of a company’s outstanding shares to bring a class action or derivative suit.

Introduction written by Tanya Dmitronow and Julia Pizzi. Full analysis written by Sarah Gold and Richard Spinogatti.

Although they often involve overlapping issues, shareholder derivative lawsuits are fundamentally different from securities class actions. While the object of a securities class action is to hold the company (and, perhaps, its…

Remember corporate raiders, green-mailers, and sharks? They have all moved up town and been embraced by ISS and its institutional investor clients as shareholder activists committed to corporate ‘‘reform.’’ Cheap capital and the expanded use of derivatives to accumulate enormous equity positions both quickly and quietly have fueled a binge…