According to an Associated Press article today by Kristen Hays, a federal judge in the Enron securities class action case gave final approval to the $6.6 billion in settlements reached with defendants Citigroup Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. In addition to the $7 billion (and counting) in Enron settlements, the SCAS database shows another U.S. $7 billion in pending securities class action settlements from shareholder actions at Sears, Nortel, AIG, HealthSouth, FreddieMac, the IPO Securities Litigation, Time Warner and dozens of other cases.

With over $14 billion in the settlement pipeline, there is now a huge amount of money waiting to be claimed by eligible shareholders. The "fun" part now for institutions is tracking these settlements, identifying the claim deadlines, and filing the proof of claims with the claims administrators.

Notably, however, a recent study by Professors Cox and Thomas entitled "Letting Billions Slip Through Your Fingers: Empirical Evidence and Legal Implication of the Failure of Financial Institutions to Participate in Securities Class Action Settlements" concluded, based on data from 118 settlements, that on average, roughly just 28% of eligible institutional investors filed claims in these securities class action settlements! 28%! Download file here to read the study.

The study further found that the institutions' mean loss was a very substantial $850,000, and the average median loss was roughly $275,000. Perhaps most importantly, the study showed that had these institutions filed claims, the average mean recovery would have been approximately $280,000 and the average median recovery would have been more than $90,000.

By almost any standard, those are big bucks to be leaving on the table time after time.