A beta version of Google Finance is now up and running, and it has some tools that may be of use to securities litigators.  In particular, check out the charting function that integrates and plots news stories.  The charts are also interactive, and permit you to change the time window by simply sliding the arrow in the upper right corner of the chart.  This chart for Mills Corp., recently made a defendant in a securities class action, is a good example.  Stretch the chart out to see the bad news, the lawsuits that followed, etc.

In addition to news stories on a company, the site also aggregates blog posts, as well.  It also lets you search quickly for executives of a company in its specific context of finance/public companies, eliminating the million other search results you'd get if you plugged something like "Robert Iger" into Google.

Are you a lawyer?  Did you write a brilliant memo or article about some securities litigation topic and post it to your website today or yesterday or last week?  Well, people like me and many of the readers of this blog would like to read your brilliant work but guess what?  We don't know it exists. 

On the other hand, as discussed here, law firms like Wilmer Cutler (sorry, "WilmerHale") have taken the initiative to add an RSS feed to their website.  And so when they post their memos, etc. to their website (such as this interesting analysis posted today about Siebel's Reg FD battle with the SEC), those of us who are looking for such things find them immediately.

Let me preface this by stating that I am far from a technology wiz, and only starting using RSS ("Really Simple Syndication") to receive information in the last month or so.  Indeed, although I have had an RSS feed attached to this blog for over two years, I was pretty darn ignorant as to what that meant, where information was going, how, etc.  until recently.

Now, of course, I have seen the light and am a huge fan of RSS and the efficiency it brings to the information gathering I need to do here at ISS/SCAS/SLW.  I think that the legal community, however, is still largely in the "blissfully ignorant" stage I was in until recently, but there are signs that this is beginning to change.

For instance, as Larry Bodine observes in this post on his Professional Marketing blog, the law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr has become one of the first law firms to offer RSS feeds of its various practice group publications.  For those of you out there who have no idea what I'm talking about, let me explain:  Wilmer puts out securities-related memos such as this one for clients and prospects.  In the old days, firms would print out hundreds of these memos and mail them via snail mail to a long list of recipients.  As the internet grew in popularity, firms started to also post these memos to their websites.  Later, they started sending such memos out to email lists.  And now--via RSS--they can push these memos out to anyone who is set up to receive a feed from Wilmer and who has an RSS reader (such as Bloglines)--like me.

Anyway, props to Wilmer for being an early mover in the RSS feed area.  I hope and suspect that in the near future, Wilmer will have a lot of company doing this.

As widely anticipated, the SEC announced today that Linda Chatman Thomsen has been named as the new Director of the Division of Enforcement.   According to the SEC's press release, Ms. Thomsen has been at the Commission since 1995 and has served as the Division's Deputy Director since 2002.  She succeeds Stephen M. Cutler, who announced last month that he would leave the Commission to rejoin the private sector.  The Washington Post noted in this article that Ms. Thomsen will be the first woman in the SEC's 71-year history to hold the Director of Enforcement position.

A November 2004 WSJ profile of Ms. Thomsen that was part of its "50 Women to Watch" report is available here.

Institutional Investor magazine reports that the FBI is investigating a male individual claiming to be an SEC examiner who recently called six or seven hedge funds and asked questions about the funds' business. According to the article,

Kathryn McGrath, partner at Crowell & Moring in Washington, and a former SEC lawyer, said that in more than 17 years at the SEC she had never experienced this type of infraction. McGrath said that impersonating a federal official is a criminal act and one that would probably result in prison time--even for a first time offender. "These days, to pull off that impersonation the person is going to have to act unreasonable," McGrath added.

The flow of bad news from bakeries and doughnut makers had me wondering in February and again just last week when we might see the first Atkins-diet based securities class action. That question was answered on Thursday, May 12 in the form of this complaint against Krispy Kreme Doughnuts. According to the complaint, "unbeknownst to investors, Defendants failed to disclose that, as a result of the trend toward low-fat, low carbohydrate diets, such as the South Beach and Atkins diets, Krispy Kreme had been suffering from increasingly poor sales performance...."