Alison Frankel reports:
... according to three top-notch plaintiffs’ lawyers who talked to me on background, a series of recent decisions from the Delaware Supreme Court and Chancery Court has made it much tougher for investors to police corporate boards and advisers, to block shareholder votes on deals involving a single bidder and to recover damages for disclosure violations if shareholders have voted in favor of a merger. The net effect of this recent precedent, they said, is to encourage shareholders to file M&A class actions in federal court, alleging violations of federal disclosure laws, rather than bringing fiduciary duty suits in Delaware.
These lawyers weren’t even talking about Chancery Court’s celebrated 2015 crackdown on “deal tax” settlements. You probably remember that Delaware judges acted in concert to squelch M&A class action settlements in which corporations received broad releases from shareholder claims in exchange for additional, often immaterial, proxy disclosures.
Chancery Court’s refusal to sign off on six- or seven-figure fees for plaintiffs’ lawyers who negotiated disclosure-only settlements has already sharply reduced the number of M&A challenges filed in Delaware. According to a Cornerstone Research study published this summer, nearly two-thirds of all deals valued at more than $100 million still provoked shareholder litigation, but that’s way down from the 2013 peak of 94 percent – and shareholder lawyers are much more likely to file investor suits outside of Delaware. (Thus explaining Time Warner’s new forum selection clause.)
For all of the attention paid to the clampdown on disclosure-only settlements (including by me!), the Delaware Supreme Court’s 2015 opinion in Corwin v. KKR may turn out to have been a more important disincentive for shareholder lawyers to sue in Chancery Court. In the Corwin decision, written by Chief Justice Leo Strine, the state supreme court held that if a deal is approved by “fully informed, uncoerced” shareholders, the board’s actions during the sale process should be reviewed under the extremely forgiving business judgment standard. Effectively, the Corwin ruling spelled the end of post-closing damages claims in deals shareholders voted to approve.
...
The answer, they say, may be to stop litigating M&A challenges as fiduciary duty cases in Delaware and instead start asserting violations of federal securities law, which, after all, prohibits corporations from making false or misleading proxy filings.
I assume that exclusive forum bylaws that tried to keep such cases out of federal courts would run afoul of the securities law provisions giving federal courts exclusive jurisdiction over federal securities law claims. In which case, the onus will be on federal courts to make use of the tools given them by the PSLRA to prevent a new generation of deal tax litigation.
