PACER and AIG

I used the acronym PACER in yesterday's blog entry but neglected to explain myself.

Here goes, then. PACER stands for "Public Access to Court Electronic Records," and it provides exactly that (for a modest fee) for anyone with internet access.

For a reporter nowadays it's a wonderful time saver in contrast to the old days when you'd have to cajole a court clerk into faxing you the files. Alas! not every state court system has caught up with the digital era. Some of the states have their analogs to the federal PACER, but they vary wildly in ease of access and use.

PACER itself, though, is marvellous. Thanks to it, I just typed in "Ohio Public Employees Retirement System" for the district court, southern district of New York and found the four cases there in which OPERS is a party, Two of them seem relevant (judging from the name alone) to the matter I was discussing in yesterday's entry -- OPERS v. Greenberg et al., and In Re AIG Securities Litigation.

The "In re" case is, as such titles generally indicate, a consolidationof several distinct filings. The "OPERS v. Greenberg" lawsuit claimed that in order to get out from under that action, in which he was a co-defendant, Greenberg made a "fraudulent conveyance" of his stock to his wife without compensation, and OPERS (filing in May 2005) asked the court to set aside this conveyance.

The "fraudulent conveyance" case was dismissed by agreement of the parties three months later. The big "In re: AIG" action is still open. I'll wait to open that file, though, until Christmas day.