On Monday, Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer released a report on New York City’s competitiveness in which they warned, “the prevalence of meritless securities lawsuits and settlements in the U.S. has driven up the apparent and actual cost of business — and driven away potential investors.” The report described “securities litigation reform” — including a possible limit on punitive damages — as a “critically important” nearterm priority.

Ironically, on the same day the report was released, a federal judge in California, Jeremy Fogel, named the New York City Employees’ Retirement System as the lead plaintiff in a class-action securities lawsuit against Apple Computer and its executives and directors. It will be up to a judge to decide whether the case is “meritless,” but surely it is an example of bad timing, as NYCERS is chaired by Mr. Bloomberg’s finance commissioner, Martha Stark. Another NYCERS trustee is the city comptroller, William Thompson Jr., who if he succeeds in winning the mayoralty in 2009 will have the challenge of keeping New York the financial capital.

There’s even more bad timing to go around here, though. This week, Governor Spitzer was crafting a new ethics law in Albany that, as the New York Post put it, “closes a controversial ‘revolving door’ loophole that allows legislative staff to retire and immediately become powerful paid lobbyists who roam the halls of the state Capitol trading on their connections.” Yet the small Delaware law firm, Grant & Eisenhofer, that NYCERS has hired for the potentially lucrative lawsuit has on its staff as a senior counsel one Leslie Conason.

As the law firm’s Web site puts it, “Prior to joining G&E, Ms. Conason was responsible for managing all securities litigation for the City of New York, where she was in charge of securities litigation for the $100 billion in pension assets held by the workers and retirees for the City of New York.” Talk about a “revolving door.” We asked yesterday about how the firm was hired and whether there was a competitive bidding process for the legal work. Neither the city law department, the city comptroller’s office, nor lawyers at Grant & Eisenhofer could come up with answers by late yesterday afternoon.

No one is saying that any of them broke any laws, but Mr. Thompson has been beating up the city’s education department recently about no-bid contracts. So it’ll be interesting to see if this legal work — which could well produce tens of millions of dollars in legal fees — was put out to bid. If Mr. Thompson or the Bloomberg administration or Grant & Eisenhofer do come up with some answers on that point or on what the fees that were agreed to were, we’ll be happy to share the news with our readers.

We note, meantime, that a Grant & Eisenhofer partner, Keith Fleischman, gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to Mr. Thompson in 2003 when Mr. Fleischman was a lawyer at Milberg Weiss (a firm that has, in an unrelated case, been indicted on federal charges). Mr. Fleischman’s action wasn’t illegal, but it makes us wonder about Mr. Thompson’s judgment, as we did about Alan Hevesi’s when he raised campaign cash from trial lawyers and then awarded some of them lucrative legal fees. Hevesi has since resigned as state comptroller after pleading guilty to a felony ethics scandal. Now we see a candidate for comptroller in 2009, David Weprin, is scarfing up campaign contributions from Grant & Eisenhofer’s founder and managing partner, Jay Eisenhofer, who last year gave $4,950 to Mr. Weprin’s campaign for comptroller in 2009; he’d given $4,500 to Hevesi’s campaign in 2001.

The notion of a shareholder suit against Apple strikes us, in any event, as a stretch. Whatever shenanigans went on with Steve Jobs’ stock options, the company’s stock price is up 600% over the past two years, far outpacing the overall gains by the stock market or NYCERS. Any reasonable shareholder should be happy as a clam. New York’s economy and streetscape have certainly benefited from the city’s Apple Stores in SoHo and at the plaza of the GM building. If there’s a bright spot, it’s that one of the Apple directors named as a defendant is Albert Gore Jr. By the time the vice president is done being deposed by the class action lawyers hired by the NYCERS board, he may be ready to line up with Messrs. Schumer and Bloomberg the next time they call for legal reform.