Christopher D. Myers
Analyst · Evercore Partners
Yes, no. Very good question. And there's lumpiness in our professional services and that has to do with, primarily, with our securities lawsuit. And the securities lawsuit, at different times, we were spending more money on attorneys than others and we just -- let me give you a quick update on where that is because -- this may take a minute but I think it's probably good for all of our shareholders to hear this. So the shareholder lawsuit, we really can't comment on the substance of the 2 -- the 2 cases, the shareholder lawsuit and the derivative lawsuit but I'll give you kind of where we are procedurally. As you may recall, the judge in the federal class action dismissed the plaintiffs' initial complaint in January of 2012, holding that it did not meet the pleading thresholds under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. The plaintiffs then filed an amended complaint in February 2012, this has been going on for a while, and we filed our motion to dismiss in March of 2012. The judge then held a hearing on the amended complaint in June 2012 and issued an order dismissing the amended complaint this past August. So that's 2 dismissals. However, the judge did give the plaintiffs leave to make a third attempt to plead a case against CVB Financial and so the plaintiffs filed a second amended complaint, which is really the third go around, in September 2012. The following month, in October 2012, we filed our third consecutive motion to dismiss the latest version of what is basically the same set of claims. The hearing on our motion to dismiss took place in February 2013. So we had to prepare for that. That's what the legal expenses are. Sorry for the long answer. And we're awaiting the issuance of the court's decision. And as long as this action is allowed to continue, we intend to continually -- vigorously contest the plaintiffs' claims, which we believe are entirely without merit. Now when you look at this, you'd say, well, that's an expense for us but the vast majority of the securities lawsuit is reimbursed to us through insurance. And so you're going to see some lumpiness month over month or quarter-over-quarter. We may have a higher quarter and then a lower quarter because we're getting reimbursed. So we spend our money in, say, February and so forth and pay our bills in February and March. We may not get that vast majority of reimbursement until April or May or something like that from the insurance company. We're going to see some lumpiness but overall, we feel good about professional services. We feel like we've got it, knock on wood here, of course, but we feel like we've got it pretty contained and I think you're going to see some good numbers in 2013. I think that's -- I'm not concerned about that accelerating on us at this time overall for the year.