Appraisal, or dissenters’, rights, long an M&A afterthought, have recently attracted more attention from deal-makers as a result of a number of largely unrelated factors. By way of brief review, appraisal rights are a statutory remedy available to objecting stockholders in certain extraordinary transactions. While the details vary by state (often meaningfully), in Delaware the most common application is in a cash-out merger (including a back-end merger following a tender offer), where dissenting stockholders can petition the Chancery Court for an independent determination of the “fair value” of their stake as an alternative to accepting the offered deal price. The statute mandates that both the petitioning stockholder and the company comply with strict procedural requirements, and the process is usually expensive (often costing millions) and lengthy (often taking years). At the end of the proceedings, the court will determine the fair value of the subject shares (i.e., only those for which appraisal has been sought), with the awarded amount potentially being lower or higher than the deal price received by the balance of the stockholders.

While deal counsel have always addressed the theoretical applicability of appraisal rights where relevant, a number of developments in recent years have contributed to these rights becoming a potential new frontier in deal risk and litigation:

…continue reading: Appraisal Rights — The Next Frontier in Deal Litigation?

Takeover litigation continued unabated in 2012 according to our just released annual report Takeover Litigation in 2012.

We find that 91.7% of transactions in 2012 experienced litigation almost at an almost identical rate as 2011 when 91.4% of transactions experienced litigation. This figure continues the increasing trend of takeover litigation which is now brought at a rate almost 2.5 times that of 2005.

The number of complaints brought per transaction remained about constant in 2012 at 5.0 lawsuits per transaction – identical to the rate in 2011. While the number of lawsuits (and rough approximation of law firms) remained steady from 2011 to 2012, this still represents a more than doubling from the mean number in 2005 of 2.2 lawsuits.

Multi-jurisdictional litigation also remained similar in 2012 with 50.6% of transactions with litigation experiencing litigation in multiple states. This compares to 53.0% of transactions with multi-state litigation in 2011. This rate continues what has been described as the biggest phenomena in takeover litigation. Multi-state litigation has gone from 8.3% of litigations in 2005 to half of all transactions in 2012.

…continue reading: Takeover Litigation in 2012

This report looks at litigation challenging M&A transactions, filed by shareholders of large U.S. public target companies. These lawsuits usually take the form of class actions. Plaintiff attorneys typically allege that the target’s board of directors violated its fiduciary duties by conducting a flawed sales process that failed to maximize shareholder value. Common allegations include the failure to conduct a sufficiently competitive sale, the existence of restrictive deal protections that discouraged additional bids, and conflicts of interests, such as executive retention or change-of-control payments to executives. Another typical allegation is that the target board failed to disclose enough information about the sale process and the financial advisor’s valuation.

We used Thomson Reuters’ SDC database to obtain a list of all acquisitions of U.S. public targets valued at or over $100 million, announced in each year. We searched the SEC filings of the targets and acquirers for discussion of shareholder litigation. After the deals were closed, we used court dockets to trace litigation outcomes.

…continue reading: Shareholder Litigation Involving Mergers and Acquisitions: February 2013 Update

The recent discovery that corporate law litigation very often takes place in courts outside of Delaware has rattled the academic consensus that Delaware won the corporate law “race” by providing a well-managed forum staffed with expert judges willing to decide complex deal cases quickly. In an apparent affront to this settled understanding, recent research shows that more cases are filed against Delaware corporations in other states than in Delaware itself. [1] As a forum for corporate litigation, in other words, Delaware no longer dominates.

Shaken from their settled understandings, commentators have sounded the alarm that fewer cases decided in Delaware could, over time, reduce the expertise of the Delaware judiciary in corporate law matters. Worse, the decisions reached by non-Delaware “dilettantes” threaten to adulterate and degrade the basic Delaware product. In sum, prior commentary on the out-of-Delaware trend has treated it as very bad for corporate defendants, very bad for shareholder plaintiffs, and very bad for Delaware.

…continue reading: Multi-Forum Merger Litigation and the “Market for Preclusion”

With litigation now an inevitable feature of the deal landscape, boards evaluating the sale of their company would be well-advised to understand the variety of claims that are being made by plaintiffs in these cases, and in particular those that have gained traction with the courts. While directors taking appropriate steps to address the underlying issues will by no means ensure that litigation will not be brought, the risk of an adverse outcome can be significantly reduced by advance preparation and proactive engagement. With the ever-changing nature of claims and creativity of the plaintiffs’ bar, the outline below is not intended to be exhaustive, but rather to offer some practical guidance to target boards as they structure their sale process.

…continue reading: Guidance for Target Boards

2012 proved to be a mixed year for defendants in securities litigation, with several open questions and rare causes for optimism. The raw statistics show a steady stream of new filings, increasing median settlement amounts, and relatively low dismissal rates for existing cases. The Supreme Court will decide an important case this coming term on the issue of class certification in securities class actions, while another important case on standing awaits the Court’s decision on a pending petition for certiorari. In the appellate courts, a number of trial court decisions dismissing class action suits were affirmed, but district courts continue to issue conflicting rulings on critical disclosure issues, including the application of the SEC’s Regulation S-K to private class actions-where several courts have allowed class claims to proceed on the basis of alleged failure to disclose “known trends.”

Trial courts are issuing divergent opinions on the application of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Morrison v. Australia National Bank to claims involving the extraterritorial reach of the federal securities laws. District courts also are struggling to define who can be sued for primary liability for “making” an allegedly false statement, following the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling in Janus Capital Group Inc. v. First Derivative Traders. We discuss each of these trends below. Finally, we summarize several notable decisions arising in the world of M&A litigation, an area of securities litigation that has shown explosive growth over the last few years. For a comprehensive review of related trends in the Securities Enforcement and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act areas, please see our 2012 Year-End Client Alerts, here and here.

…continue reading: 2012 Year-End Securities Litigation Update

Shareholder lawsuits over mergers are as ubiquitous as they are meritless. The incidence of suits over public-company acquisitions rounds to always. It doesn’t matter how high the premium or how clean the deal: someone (usually, one of the same someones) will sue.

The frequency of merger lawsuits has increased steadily over time. What has changed more abruptly is their life cycle. Until recent years, once a deal closed, the lawsuit usually went away. If the plaintiffs had been unable to wring out a “therapeutic” settlement pre-close (usually, “enhanced” disclosure + a fee) they ignored or dismissed the case after the acquisition was complete. The conventional wisdom was that plaintiffs’ leverage — threatening to interfere with the deal — was gone, and so there was no longer a path to payday.

In several recent cases, however, plaintiffs’ merger lawyers have refined their business model. They keep the litigation alive post-close. They take extensive discovery, especially against the executives of the acquirer, who now control the pursestrings. This phenomenon occurs even in situations where objective factors suggest a lack of merit to the claims: e.g., high premium; no contesting bidders; overwhelming shareholder approval; customary deal terms.

Why are the plaintiff lawyers pursuing these cases?

…continue reading: Litigating Post-Close Merger Cases

Shareholder litigation challenging merger and acquisition (M&A) deals has increased substantially in recent years. To study this increase and characterize the recent litigation, Cornerstone Research and Professor Robert Daines of the Stanford Law School reviewed reports of M&A shareholder litigation in Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings related to acquisitions of U.S. public companies valued over $100 million and announced in 2010 or 2011. [1] We found that almost every acquisition of that size elicited multiple lawsuits, which were filed shortly after the deal’s announcement and often settled before the deal’s closing. Only a small fraction of these lawsuits resulted in payments to shareholders; the majority settled for additional disclosures or, less frequently, changes in merger terms, such as deal protection provisions. Interestingly, while requiring additional disclosures is a common outcome, we have not encountered a case in which shareholders rejected the deal after the additional disclosures were provided.

In this report, we provide statistics on recent M&A shareholder lawsuits, describing their prevalence, filing timelines, venue choices, outcomes, and settlement terms.

…continue reading: Developments in M&A Shareholder Litigation

For buyers of public companies, an obscure but increasingly evident judicial remedy known as “quasi-appraisal” is fast becoming a source of concern. Quasi-appraisal – as its name suggests – is not quite what parties expect from M&A litigation and has the capacity to upset the familiar process accompanying the sale of a public company.

There are three primary types of M&A litigation: Pre-closing disclosure litigation, post-closing loyalty litigation and appraisal. Not every litigation fits neatly into one of these categories, but most do. Pre-closing disclosure litigation often culminates in the plaintiffs, the target company and the buyer agreeing to additional disclosures (and occasionally revisions in the transaction terms) in exchange for a class-wide release and a court-approved award of plaintiffs’ fees. In the absence of a pre-closing disclosure settlement, the second type of litigation may arise which is post-closing, class-action litigation alleging breaches of fiduciary duties (other than disclosure). Most often, such post-closing actions relate to transactions subject to entire fairness review, as, for example, when a controlling stockholder is involved. And finally, in cash-out mergers, stockholders can pursue a post-closing appraisal claim, a remedy that requires each individual stockholder wishing to pursue appraisal to dissent from the merger vote, refrain from accepting the merger consideration, and bear litigation costs. In an appraisal, dissenting stockholders also bear the risk that the court will appraise the stockholder’s shares at a lower value than the merger consideration.

…continue reading: Quasi-Appraisal: The Unexplored Frontier of Stockholder Litigation?

Notwithstanding the excellence of the Delaware judiciary, the multiple standards of review under Delaware law for reviewing the actions of a target’s directors involved in a merger or acquisition transaction are cumbersome, a source of needless litigation, and economically inefficient. In my paper Change of Control Special Committee: Breathing Life into CNX, recently made public on SSRN, I put forward a proposal to resolve these issues through changes in Delaware’s General Corporation Law (“DGCL”). DGCL should be amended to permit the shareholders of a corporation to adopt a provision requiring that if the corporation becomes a target of a bona fide acquisition proposal, the board of the corporation must petition the Delaware Court of Chancery for the appointment of an independent, disinterested, and knowledgeable special committee of the board (a “Change of Control Special Committee”). This Committee would have complete power over the acquisition transaction. At the discretion of the Delaware Court of Chancery, a member of the current board could be appointed to the Change of Control Special Committee.

…continue reading: Change of Control Special Committee: Breathing Life into CNX