For securities class action lawyers, as a class, 2011 will go down as pretty bad year. Not since 2004 have fees and expenses — which total $594 million so far this year — been so low, according to a year-end report by NERA Economic Consulting. Aside from 2004 (when fees amounted to $480 million), the plaintiffs bar’s bounty has hasn’t been this small since 2001 ($530 million.) Last year, fees and expenses topped $1.4 billion, according to the report. NERA attributed the decline to a combination of the lower average and median settlement size, and fewer settlements in 2011. Average settlement values of securities class actions fell to $31 million in 2011, far below the 2010 average of $108 million, and filings dropped to 232 from 241 last year. The big story in securities class actions has been the explosion lawsuits against Chinese companies,which have accounted for 39 of the shareholder class action filings so far this year.  Several actions targeted companies that gained access to the U.S. market through “reverse mergers,” a backdoor process that allows a private company to merge with a public one so as to gain access to capital markets. The SEC has suspended trading in at least six Chinese reverse-merger companies this year. The annual number of filings hasn’t varied much in recent years, but the mix of cases has changed dramatically, according to the report. For instance, suits objecting to a merger or an acquisition have accounted for nearly 29% of all filings so far in 2011, and the filings against Chinese companies have accounted for 18%. Meanwhile, credit crisis-related suits have dwindled to 5% of all 2011 filings and only three Ponzi scheme-related securities class actions were filed this year, according to the report. Compare that to 2008, when about two out of every five suits were credit crisis-related, while M&A-related suits and lawsuits against Chinese companies together accounted for just 9% of filings. [wsj 12/14/11]