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Last month, in Vento v. Curry,[1] the Delaware Chancery Court preliminarily enjoined the Consolidated Communication Holding (“Consolidated”) shareholder vote[2] on the company’s all-stock acquisition of FairPoint Communications (“FairPoint”) due to Consolidated’s failure to adequately disclose the compensation its financial advisor would receive for participating in the acquisition financing. The court’s ruling ultimately had very little impact on the transaction – Consolidated subsequently disclosed that its financial advisor would receive $7 million in financing fees and the Consolidated shareholders overwhelmingly approved the transaction without any delay.[3]  Vento nonetheless provides important guidance for principals and financial advisors in evaluating whether disclosure of a financial advisor’s transaction-related compensation is required when seeking shareholder approval of an M&A transaction.   
Continue Reading Assessing Financial Advisor Compensation Disclosure Following Vento v. Curry

Earlier this month, following three hours of deliberation, a California federal jury found that Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. had violated the federal whistleblower provisions by unlawfully firing Sanford Wadler, its former general counsel, and awarded Wadler nearly $11 million in damages.  Wadler had sued his former company under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the Dodd-Frank Act and California state law, asserting that he was wrongfully terminated in retaliation for investigating and reporting to senior management potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (“FCPA”) in China.  The pre-trial proceedings and three-week trial involved several whistleblower-friendly rulings that promise to generate additional litigation.  Those legal determinations, as well as the jury’s prompt finding of liability and imposition of a substantial award in the face of an aggressive corporate defense, bring to the forefront significant issues relevant to public companies, directors and other corporate stakeholders – not the least of which is the precedent of a general counsel in the role of whistleblower. 
Continue Reading Jury Awards Ousted General Counsel Nearly $11 Million in Whistleblower Retaliation Action – Key Takeaways

President Trump has repeatedly used his Twitter account to single out companies for criticism of their business practices, raising the question for a broad range of public companies of how to prepare for and potentially respond to such criticism. Of course, rhetorical attempts by politicians to influence the conduct of private enterprise – commonly referred…

Playing a Zynga game often requires patience.  Patience, and persistence, were a winning combination for the plaintiff Thomas Sandys who brought a derivative suit against Zynga for alleged breaches of fiduciary duties after the Zynga Board approved a secondary sale of company stock by insiders, including Zynga’s controlling shareholder and then-CEO (“controlling shareholder/CEO”) during a blackout period.  Shortly after the sale, a disappointing earnings announcement resulted in a significant stock price drop.
Continue Reading From the Game Room to the Board Room – Reconsidering the Independence of Independent Directors

In a recent decision[1], Vice Chancellor Laster of the Delaware Court of Chancery clarified certain issues related to the obligations of a controlling stockholder that often arise in connection with going private and similar transactions.  The case involved a relatively conventional proposal by a controlling stockholder (the Anderson family) to acquire the remaining shares of Books-A-Million, Inc. (“BAM”) from BAM’s minority stockholders.  The family structured the proposal with the goal of satisfying the conditions of the MFW decision so that any challenge to the transaction would benefit from the favorable “business judgment” level of judicial review.[2]
Continue Reading Delaware Chancery Applies MFW to Dismiss Challenge to Going Private Transaction and Clarifies Obligations of Controlling Stockholders

A recent opinion from the Delaware Court of Chancery reaffirmed the importance of bringing disclosure claims before closing (when steps can still be taken to achieve an informed stockholder vote), and the difficult hurdles faced by a plaintiff pursuing disclosure claims after closing.
Continue Reading Delaware Court of Chancery Reaffirms That Disclosure Claims Should Be Brought Before Closing

As the Delaware Supreme Court narrows the avenues for post-closing challenges to mergers (see our discussions of the implications of the Corwin and Cornerstone decisions here, here, here and here), we expect that plaintiffs’ lawyers will increasingly seek to base their merger suits on specific allegations of conflicts that may have tainted the oversight of processes to sell companies in hopes of supporting claims for breaches of the duty of loyalty and the applicability of the enhanced scrutiny of the entire fairness doctrine.  Given that virtually every merger includes some special merger benefits for directors that may be susceptible to an attempt at such a claim, it is timely that the Delaware Court of Chancery issued a decision over the summer of 2016 that provides useful guidance on how to evaluate the most common of special merger benefits to insiders:  protection against exposure to pre-merger claims.
Continue Reading When Do Merger Benefits to Directors Constitute Disabling Conflicts?

As discussed in prior posts, recent applications of the Delaware Supreme Court’s decision in Corwin v. KKR Financial Holdings, 125 A.3d 304 (Del. 2015) have emphasized the high bar for surviving a motion to dismiss in damages actions by stockholder plaintiffs after completion of a merger transaction, as “dismissal is typically the result” where informed, disinterested stockholder approval requires application of the business judgment rule to extinguish all claims except for waste.  See Singh v. Attenborough, 137 A.3d 151, 152 (Del. 2016).  Two recent Chancery Court decisions have further underscored the claim-extinguishing effect of informed, disinterested stockholder approval.
Continue Reading Recent Applications of Corwin v. KKR Financial Holdings LLC Confirm High Bar to Pleading Post-Closing Damages Actions

Since our last blog post on the changing landscape of disclosure-only settlements in the Delaware Court of Chancery, there have been developments in several areas, including the continued lower filing rates for shareholder litigation in Delaware, the adoption of the Trulia “plainly material” standard for supplemental disclosures by the Seventh Circuit, and the lower standard for disclosures required in order for plaintiffs’ lawyers to be awarded a fee in the mootness context. 
Continue Reading Update About Disclosure-Only Settlements in M&A Litigation