For a baseball player, batting .100 won’t get you into the Hall of Fame.  But for Rosanne Ott, a former Black Hawk helicopter pilot turned portfolio manager, batting .100 kept her case alive.  See Ott v. Fred Alger Mgmt., Inc., No. 11 Civ. 4418 (LAP) (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 27, 2012).

Ott sued her former employer Fred Alger Management (“Alger”), associated companies, and Alger’s CEO/CIO for alleged violations of the Investment Advisors Act, breach of contract, and the Dodd-Frank Act’s whistleblower provisions.  She also filed a derivative claim against the CEO/CIO on behalf of Alger’s shareholders for breach of fiduciary duty.  In her 10-count, 65-page amended complaint, Ott alleged that Alger had adopted a trading policy for her fund (the Health Sciences Fund) that allowed other Alger funds to make better trades at her fund’s expense.  

Alger and the other defendants moved to dismiss.  For four counts, Ott didn’t respond, and for five others, the district court decided that she had not adequately alleged supporting facts.  That left only her whistleblower claim, based on the anti-retaliation provision of the Dodd-Frank Act, 15 U.S.C. § 78u-6(h)(1)(A)(i).  (Say that cite three times fast.) 

• Dodd-Frank Act
• Motions to Dismiss
• Whistleblowers
• Wrongful Termination

News in suits by suits for you to ponder once you’ve tired of reading about replacement refs and bacon:

• Every law librarian I know is a kind, mild-mannered person who would never dream of threatening to bash you with a crowbar.  But Donald Raymond, formerly of Southern Illinois University, was accused of making such a threat, and was fired shortly after the allegation.  Karen Sloan at the National Law Journal writes that Raymond sued his employer after his termination, and that his case has now survived a motion to dismiss. 

• Breach of Contract
• Trade Secrets
• Whistleblowers
• Wrongful Termination

Section 922 of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 has received a lot of attention in legal circles.  That provision established a whistleblower program under which a person who voluntarily provides the Securities & Exchange Commission with information about an employer’s wrongdoing can receive an award.    To help strengthen the program, Section 922 also protects whistleblowers from retaliation for disclosing information that they report directly to the SEC. 

On August 21, the SEC announced its first payment of a whistleblower award under the new program.  

• Whistleblowers

Many of the cases we talk about here on Suits by Suits are breach of contract cases brought by executives against their former employers.  Sometimes, however, the employer turns the tables, bringing an action against a former executive for breaching its confidences.  When that happens, the executive can find himself owing the company a lot of money, rather than the other way around.

Such was the fate of a former lawyer for Toyota named Dimitrios Biller, the subject of the Ninth Circuit’s recent opinion in Biller v. Toyota Motor Corp., 668 F.3d 655 (9th Cir. 2012).  

• Arbitration
• Breach of Contract
• Confidentiality
• Trade Secrets
• Whistleblowers

Tariq Hassan, the former Chief Procurement Officer for JP Morgan Chase (JPMC), is taking the bank to court.  In a suit filed June 15, he claims that JPMC fired him for investigating a “kickback scheme” involving the bank’s vendor management office and IT department.  Then, Hassan says, JPMC’s Chief Executive Officer, Jamie Dimon, and others at JPMC badmouthed him to Citigroup Global Markets when that company was considering hiring him, and Citigroup retaliated further against him for his whistleblowing by not hiring him.

• Whistleblowers
• Wrongful Termination