Posts in Settlements

Chancery Declines to Modify Status Quo Order to Allow Partial Performance of Pending Settlement

In re AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. Stockholder Litigation, Consol. C.A. No. 2023-0215-MTZ (Del. Ch. Apr. 5, 2023)
In various contexts, upon request or stipulation, the Court of Chancery will impose status quo orders, which typically restrain corporate action pending the Court’s adjudication of disputed rights. A party seeking to modify or vacate such an order bears the burden of establishing good cause for the change. Here, following a settlement agreement between the parties, the plaintiffs sought to lift a status quo order to permit the defendant, AMC, to partially effectuate the settlement. The proposed action would alter the company’s capital structure. The litigation involved class claims, implicating Court of Chancery Rule 23, and the requirement that any class action or derivative settlement be approved by the Court following notice to the stockholders and the opportunity to object. The Court had not yet considered or approved the proposed settlement. In these circumstances, with little more than a desire for speed offered in support of the motion, the Court declined to lift the status quo order, citing the Court’s gatekeeping role in Rule 23 settlements.

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Chancery Finds Plaintiffs Lost Direct and Derivative Standing After Sale of Shares

Urdan v. WR Capital Partners, LLC, C.A. No. 2018-0343-JTL (Del. Ch. Aug. 19, 2019).

It is well-settled Delaware law that the right to bring a derivative claim in the corporation’s name or a direct claim in the individual stockholder’s name is a property right associated with the ownership of shares and that those rights normally pass from a selling stockholder to the buyer.  Relatedly, Delaware law imposes two conditions for derivative standing: first, a contemporaneous ownership requirement, meaning the plaintiff must have been a stockholder at the time of the complained of wrong; and, second, a continuous ownership requirement, meaning the plaintiff must continue to be a stockholder to pursue its claims.  The rules are slightly different in the direct standing context.  In contrast to the continuous ownership requirement for derivative claims, a selling stockholder may retain the right to bring a direct claim by contract.  This decision explains and applies these concepts, finding certain stockholders lost both forms of standing when reaching a settlement, despite an apparent attempt to avoid that result in the relevant contracts. More ›

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Citing Trulia and Walgreens Decisions, Federal District Court Orders Plaintiffs’ Counsel to Return Agreed-Upon Mootness Fee

House v. Akorn, Inc., Consol. Nos. 17-C-5018, 17-C-5022, 17-C-5026 (N.D. Ill. Jun. 24, 2019).

Disclosure-only settlements of stockholder class actions have received increased scrutiny following the Delaware Court of Chancery’s Trulia decision in 2016 and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals’ Walgreens decision later that year.  Those decisions observed the problem of M&A strike suits, expressed disfavor of disclosure-only settlements in M&A class actions, and significantly raised the bar for getting the required court approval of such settlements.  One consequence has been many M&A suits migrating from the Delaware Court of Chancery to federal courts around the country.  Another has been defendants more frequently acting to voluntarily moot the claimed disclosure violations through supplemental disclosures.  In that instance, the parties then face the choice of either litigating the appropriate mootness fee award to plaintiffs’ counsel for the supplemental disclosures prompted by their claims or, alternatively, privately negotiating the mootness fee award and thus avoiding the judicial process, provided no other stockholders object to the negotiated award.  More ›

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Court Of Chancery Declines To Approve Derivative Settlement

Stein v. Blankfein, C.A. 2017-0354-SG (October 23, 2018)

This is the rare decision that declines to approve the settlement of a derivative suit. The Court rejected the settlement because the proposed terms required the corporation, as a nominal defendant, to release breach of fiduciary duty claims against the director defendants in return for which those directors would agree to make disclosures already required by law. The Court viewed that agreeing to do what you had to do anyway as providing no real consideration for the release of the claims. This result illustrates the scrutiny the Court of Chancery applies to such settlements that affect corporate and stockholder rights.

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Court of Chancery Approves Disclosure Settlement Post-Trulia and Finds Management Projections Plainly Material

In re BTU International, Inc. Stockholders Litigation, Consol. C.A. No. 10310-CB (Del. Ch. Feb. 18, 2016)(Transcript)

As detailed in a prior post (available here), the ruling in In re Trulia, Inc. Stockholders Litigation, 2016 WL 270821 (Del. Ch. Jan. 22, 2016) changed the legal landscape for so-called disclosure settlements. Among other things, Trulia holds that disclosures must be “plainly material” to support a disclosure settlement – meaning that it “should not be a close call that the supplemental information is material as that term is defined under Delaware law.”  Exactly what disclosures fit into that category remained an open question. More ›

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Court of Chancery Targets “Deal Tax” Litigation By Increasing its Scrutiny of “Disclosure-Only” Settlements

            M&A lawsuits and so-called “disclosure-only” settlements – where stockholder plaintiffs drop their requests to enjoin a deal and grant defendants broad releases primarily in exchange for supplemental disclosures to stockholders, followed by requests for six-figure attorneys’ fee awards – have proliferated in recent years.  In turn, these lawsuits have faced increasing scrutiny from scholars, practitioners, and members of the judiciary, who assert that these ubiquitous settlements rarely yield genuine benefits for stockholders, threaten the loss of potentially valuable claims that have not been sufficiently investigated, and only serve the interests of opportunistic plaintiffs’ counsel and defendants happy to acquire a form of deal insurance through a broad release of class action claims challenging the merger. More ›

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Court Of Chancery Explores The Effect Of Federal Settlements On A Delaware Action And Applies Unocal To Bylaw Amendments

In re Ebix, Inc. S’holder Litig., Consol. C.A. No. 8526-VCN (Jan. 15, 2016)

This is an interesting decision for two reasons.  More ›

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