Sky Blog
The Delaware Court of Chancery ruled in In re Appraisal of Panera Bread Company,[1] following a six-day trial, in a 130-page decision issued on January 31, 2020, that the petitioners received more than fair value for each share …
In In re Essendant Inc. Stockholder Litigation (Dec. 30, 2019), the plaintiff-stockholders of Essendant, Inc. (the “Company”) brought claims against the Company’s directors for their decision to terminate an agreement for a stock-for-stock merger with Genuine Parts Company (“GPC”) in …
Regulation A+, an exemption from registration that took effect in 2015 and allows small companies to issue stock to the general public, presents interesting questions of corporate governance.
The maximum offering size of $50 million means that most Reg A+ …
Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Pinterest offer hundreds of items, from t-shirts to coffee mugs to posters, warning against agreement for the sake of agreement.* My wife has, on more than one occasion, reminded me of the danger.[1] And now, …
Breach of the duty of oversight claims against Delaware directors are known as “possibly the most difficult theory in corporation law upon which a plaintiff might hope to win a judgment.”[1] The plaintiff must successfully argue that the directors …
Twenty some years before Bill Allen was appointed Chancellor of Delaware, Bayless Manning, a fine corporate law scholar, announced the death of corporate law “as a field of intellectual effort.” Manning described its focus as “our great empty corporation statutes …
Last weekend the corporate legal community lost one of its finest: former Delaware Chancellor and Professor at New York University School of Law, William T. Allen. For 12 years Bill Allen and I served together as judicial colleagues on the …
The embrace of shareholder activism as a tool to bring about broad social change is a welcome development. It reflects a trend of outsourcing public functions and values to private actors and stems in part from a frustration with interest …
In an important transcript ruling issued on August 14,[1] the Delaware Court of Chancery upheld the validity and vitality of advance notice bylaw provisions, which govern the timing and disclosure requirements of stockholder nominations of board candidates. The ruling …
The following compilation is our fifth annual review of significant state court decisions relevant for private company M&A transactions and related governance matters and disputes. The summary includes the landmark Akorn v. Fresenius decision, which is the first Delaware …
On December 19, 2018, the Delaware Court of Chancery held that forum selection provisions contained in the certificate of incorporation of Delaware corporations are invalid to the extent that they require any claim under the Securities Act of 1933 to …
On October 1, the Delaware Court of Chancery, in a record-breaking 246-page opinion, held that Fresenius Kabi AG (a German publicly listed healthcare company) did not have to consummate its proposed acquisition of Akorn, Inc. (a Nasdaq-listed generic pharmaceutical company) …
Beginning at least as far back as Professor William Carey’s famously withering 1974 Yale Law Journal article about Delaware’s “enabling” of bad corporate actors, critics of the state’s corporate jurisprudence have alluded to a “race to the bottom” in which …
Last quarter, the Delaware courts issued the first post-Dell appraisal decisions—Aruba and AOL (issued by the Court of Chancery) and SWS Group (issued by the Delaware Supreme Court, affirming the Court …
On April 20, 2018, Columbia Law School will hold its 2018 Mergers & Acquisitions and Corporate Governance Conference at Convene in midtown Manhattan. The event is co-sponsored by the law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & …
The first half of 2017 brought with it a nearly unprecedented rate of new filings (a pace few predicted), as well as several important developments in the securities laws. Among other things, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to weigh in …
In In re Massey Energy Company Derivative and Class Action Litigation, the Delaware Court of Chancery recently dismissed shareholders’ derivative and putative direct claims alleging that Massey’s former directors and officers caused the company to willfully disregard safety regulations. …
It has long been a policy of corporate law1 that the informed business decisions of independent and disinterested directors are protected by the presumption of the business judgment rule.2 Courts are reluctant to second-guess decisions that are made …
The Delaware Chancery Court’s vice chancellor speaks with Reynolds Holding about Dell, DFC Global and appraisal actions, which allow holdout shareholders who didn’t vote for a deal to ask the court to set a higher price for their stock. The …