(Reuters) - The legal data analytics company Lex Machina released a report on Thursday, delving into three years' of information about private and regulatory securities litigation. The report is full of interesting tidbits – I would not have guessed, for instance, that Delaware judges heard more securities cases per capita than judges in any other federal district – but the data point that sent my eyebrows shooting into my hairline was that the second-most prolific securities plaintiff in America is a woman named Shiva Stein.

Keep in mind that the Lex Machina report included filings by federal regulators suing corporations for violating securities laws. So, as you would expect, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was the most frequent plaintiff, filing 760 suits between 2018 and 2020. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission brought 85 cases, ranking third. Stein, according to Lex Machina, wasn't as busy as the SEC between 2018 and 2020 – but with 124 securities suits filed in federal court in that three-year span, she's well ahead of the CFTC.

Lex Machina, a legal analytics company owned by LexisNexis, did not report on litigation outcomes for particular plaintiffs, so we can't tell from the report what Stein's filings accomplished. (One of her best-known cases, a derivative suit in Delaware Chancery Court alleging that Goldman Sachs over-compensated some board members, settled in 2020 with Goldman agreeing to cut some board members' pay.) It is clear, though, that her filings are ticking upward. Stein filed 28 claims in 2018 and 48 suits in both 2019 and 2020.

I went to Westlaw to see if she is keeping up the pace in 2021 – and to find out more about what kind of suits Stein is filing and what results she is getting.

It turns out that she is busier than ever. According to Westlaw, Stein has filed 32 new securities complaints so far this year. That's, on average, eight cases per month, or nearly two cases a week. If she continues suing at this rate for the rest of the year, she will top 100 new suits in 2021. (I was not able to obtain contact information for Stein.)

Stein's filings - which are concentrated in federal courts in Manhattan and Delaware, although she has also sued in California and Maryland - are not prospective class actions. She sues just on her own behalf, typically alleging after a company has announced a merger that its proxy disclosures are inadequate.

As you know, there was a time not very long ago when merger announcements were inevitably followed by shareholder class actions that often settled when defendants agreed to beef up proxy disclosures. Those filings dried up in Delaware Chancery Court after Delaware judges cracked down in 2016's In re Trulia (129 A.3d 884) on fees for shareholder lawyers in disclosure-only settlements.

The suits then migrated to federal court, where plaintiffs' lawyers eventually switched to suing on behalf of individual investors rather than classes of shareholders. In a 2019 Vanderbilt Law Review analysis, Mootness Fees, professors Matthew Cain, Jill Fisch, Steven Davidoff Solomon and Randall Thomas concluded that many of those federal court cases ended with shareholder lawyers receiving mootness fees from defendants in exchange for the voluntary dismissal of their client's claims before substantial litigation takes place.

Stein has already dismissed voluntarily 18 of the 32 suits she has filed in 2021. In reviewing the dockets for Stein's 2021 filings, I did not see any case that entailed substantive litigation aside from the initial case filing.

It's not clear from the dockets whether Stein or her lead counsel in these suits, Gloria Melwani of Melwani & Chan, received any compensation from defendants. None of the dockets mentioned a mootness fee. I specifically asked Melwani in an email if she or Stein had been compensated by defendants in exchange for dismissing Stein's lawsuits. She did not respond to that question. She also did not immediately respond to a phone message requesting contact information for Stein.

Melwani did say, however, that Stein's suits serve an important public purpose. Melwani recently founded her own firm after serving as of counsel at Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz. Her previous firm, she said, has a 40-year track record of advocating for shareholders, and she and Stein are maintaining that legacy.

"The shareholder suits that Ms. Stein brought were dismissed after the defendant corporations made corrective disclosures that more fully informed public shareholders according to the federal securities laws," Melwani said in her email. "They were dismissed without much substantive litigation because the defendant corporations had no defense to the claims Ms. Stein brought."

At least one securities defense lawyer would beg to differ. Susan Saltzstein of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom participated in a panel discussion on Thursday about the Lex Machina report. One of the topics was Stein's prolific filings. Saltzstein pointed out that one of the reasons that Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act in 1995 was to put shareholder litigation in the hands of institutional investors instead of individual plaintiffs and their law firms.

"Maybe (the PSLRA) hasn't been as successful as we would've liked," Saltzstein said. "Are these really cases that are being pursued on behalf of stockholders? Who is driving these lawsuits … if Shiva Stein has been raising these claims in 48 different cases?"

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