It's the hottest fad to sweep the nation since the hula hoop, so hurry up, lawyers, and climb on the "Let's File A Class Action Against Apple For Stock Manipulation" bandwagon! But be quick, or else you'll get branded as a pathetic legal outcast and you'll have to sit with the geeks and dweebs at lunch for the rest of your professional careers. If you value your reputation in the least, you'll slap Apple with a lawsuit posthaste. After all, all the cool lawyers are doing it...

That's right, the three suits we mentioned yesterday were evidently just the beginning. It's looking like pig-pile on Apple time, because the Mac Observer reports that a fourth firm has now leaped into the fray: Cauley Geller Bowman & Coates, LLP is the latest to accuse Apple of making false and misleading statements about its financial situation in order to drive up its share price and profit from stock sales before the bottom dropped out in September of last year. We'd accuse Cauley et al of just copying the cool kids in a feeble attempt to relate, but a Digital Coast Daily article from back in May reveals that this firm has been "assiduously adding to the number of boom-era public companies being sued" for stock fraud, and while Apple isn't exactly a dot-com organization, its stock tanked in much the same manner. So it's all coming naturally to CGBC.

Interestingly enough, CGBC's press release describing the action contains much of the exact same language as used in the press release issued by Schiffrin & Barroway, which was excerpted by the Mac Observer yesterday-- and that press release was almost identical to the one issued by Milberg Weiss a couple of weeks ago. Presumably this sort of thing is standard practice in class action law, but to us it just looks like the cool kids all copy each others' homework.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how Apple defends itself against these allegations; faithful viewer Blah admits to having purchased Apple stock pre-meltdown partly due to comments that Money Czar Fred Anderson made to the Sydney Morning Herald in August, and it's hard to deny that there's a pretty rosy picture being painted merely a month before the collapse. ("Apple expects to eclipse Dell as the fastest growing computer company this quarter"? Hmmmm...) In the meantime, we're at four class actions and counting; anyone want to start an office pool on how long it'll be before the count hits double digits?