Sky Blog
When a portion of the purchase price in an acquisition is contingent on the earnings or other performance metric(s) of the acquired business post-closing (i.e., an “earn-out” provision), buyers and sellers routinely discuss their aspirations and expectations regarding the go-forward …
When assessing the legality of actions by boards of directors, corporate officers, and shareholders, judges use five standards of review: the business judgment rule, Unocal, Revlon, the entire fairness standard, and, to some degree, Blasius.[1]
These …
The Delaware Court of Chancery provided its latest guidance on so-called Caremark claims in a New Year’s Eve opinion issued by Vice Chancellor Glasscock in Richardson v. Clark, an action brought derivatively by a stockholder of Moneygram International, Inc. …
COVID-19 has led companies to patch-up financial reporting by adding estimates of pre-COVID-19 profits to their EBITDA. Recently, COVID-19 prompted measuring-equipment manufacturer Schenck Process, for example, to add back €5.4 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA of €18.3 …
The lynchpin of many securities fraud cases is whether a plaintiff can establish with particularity that a defendant acted with scienter (i.e., fraudulent intent). Where the defendant is an individual person, this question may be relatively straightforward. Where the defendant …
On June 10, 2020, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a putative securities fraud class action in a potentially significant decision for securities defendants, particularly those in the pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device space. The Ninth Circuit in Nguyen …
On May 27, the Second Circuit issued a ruling that significantly heightens the already heavy burden plaintiffs face in pleading corporate scienter. The Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of a putative securities class action against Kimberly-Clark Corporation and Avanos Medical, Inc. …
Over the past 20 years, civil penalties have become an increasingly important part of the SEC’s enforcement program. The agency frequently imposes large monetary penalties, highlights those penalties in press releases, and touts them in end-of-year statistics. Civil penalties are …
As the season changes to fall, and baseball playoffs and football dominate sports headlines, the home field advantage has proven important once again. But in the regulatory litigation game, it appears that even a home field advantage cannot help the …
In 2013, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced a new policy of sometimes requiring admissions when settling enforcement actions. The policy was a radical departure from the agency’s more than four decades-old practice of allowing companies and individuals to settle …
To be a public company in the United States is to be subject to an array of federally-imposed disclosure requirements. In my forthcoming article, Reviving Reliance, I describe how the private causes of action available to enforce these requirements …