NERA Senior Managing Director Lucy Allen was retained by counsel for the Special Litigation Committee (SLC) of Bumble, Inc. in a shareholder derivative lawsuit filed against Bumble’s officers and directors and its controlling stockholder Blackstone, Inc. Plaintiffs alleged Blackstone relied on material non-public information about Bumble’s upcoming earnings announcement to sell $1.1 billion Bumble shares in a secondary offering before a substantial decline in the stock price. Plaintiffs alleged Blackstone’s sale constituted insider trading and lodged Brophy and breach of fiduciary duty claims. 

The SLC engaged NERA to analyze what information was knowable to Blackstone when the offering was announced and whether such information could have been used to reliably predict Bumble’s stock price reaction to its upcoming earnings announcement. Ms. Allen performed statistical analyses of Bumble’s intra-quarter performance data along with event studies and market analysis of Bumble’s earnings announcements. Ms. Allen concluded that, even with the allegedly material non-public information available, it was not reliably predictable Bumble’s financial results would substantially miss market expectations in such a way that would be expected to cause the stock price to drop. Ms. Allen submitted a report to the SLC summarizing her findings, and shortly after, the SLC moved to terminate the case.

On 8 July 2025, the court held that the SLC had operated with “integrity and objectivity,” credited the SLC’s retention of NERA as a “positive step” in conducting a reasonable investigation in good faith, and adopted the SLC’s recommendation to terminate the case.