Other Commercial Litigation Topics Attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota

The Morgan Keegan Case

More In This Category

View Transcript

Morgan Keegan has been a wonderful case experience to have. What happened is, in 2007, there were some significant losses in some bond funds, and these particular bond funds were supposed to be some of the most conservative, very low-risk. And so a number of investors in the Midwest but in a lot of around the Tennessee area, the south, had invested in these bond funds after retirement. So we had a lot of professionals who had retired and many of these investors had put most of their investments in these bond funds ’cause they were highly conservative; they knew they weren’t gonna get a very high return but they were willing to accept that because of the low risk.

Well, in 2007, there was a huge loss and this wasn’t the mortgage meltdown, you can remember that was 2008, so this was before that. But what happened is there were huge losses in three of these bond funds and one of the funds experienced an 80 percent loss. So you have 75 – which our clients were, we have – we’ve met in Memphis many times with a group of our class representatives, these older individuals who have worked so hard their entire lives, put their money in these investments that they thought were very safe. They weren’t investing in some foreign growth fund but they were investing in these solid bond investments and then lost 80 percent of their life savings.

And so what we did is – the story underneath this was that the company said that they were invested in very safe investments, that was what was making up this bond fund, but actually they were investing in some of the riskiest, the lowest tranche investments, which included the mortgage-back securities, residential mortgage-backed securities and what they call the asset-backed securities, all those acronyms. But they were invested in high risk – some of the elements of these funds were very high risk and the company failed to tell the investors that they had put these high-risk investments in there.

And so I mean the privilege of getting to work with these people then, watching what happened and saying we’re going to do everything we can to get as much of that investment back. And we were able – this last spring, we were able to reach a very significant and a very meaningful settlement for these people. So it’s a very rewarding process.

Minneapolis mass tort and complex litigation attorney Carolyn Anderson explains how low-risk supposedly conservative bond funds experienced huge losses and how Zimmerman Reed attorneys helped elderly investors get their money back.

More Videos From This Lawyer