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Recent Developments in Delaware Corporation Law

By Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance

(Editor’s note: This post is by Angela Priest and Eric Wilensky of Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell LLP.)

Over the past year, the areas of corporation law impacting how transaction attorneys guide their clients developed at a significant pace. This trend emerged with Vice Chancellor Strine’s Netsmart, Topps, and Lear opinions, issued during the height of the private equity-led LBO boom and continued through Chancellor Chandler’s United Rentals opinion, in which the Court addressed issues associated with the break up of a transaction entered into during that boom. In between the Court addressed a number of issues, including permissible board actions in the context of seeking stockholder approval; when a company must include management projections in its proxy solicitation materials; and how to value a company in an appraisal proceeding.

In this article, we discuss these developments in the order that a transaction attorney would likely need to consider them-starting with the exploration of strategic alternatives and ending with litigating a busted deal. We do not intend to conduct an exhaustive analysis on any particular topic or any particular case. Instead, we intend to raise awareness of certain guidelines that these cases suggest.

What our experience has taught us over the past year, and what we hope becomes clear, is that although each opinion issued by the Delaware courts provide guidelines to transaction planners, each opinion is decided based on a particular set of facts. Thus, the opinions issued by the Delaware courts should be taken for what they are–guidelines for shaping a transaction–and not bright-line rules to be followed in all instances.

The article is available here.

Full post as published by The Harvard Law School Corporate Governance Blog on June 03, 2008 (boomark / email).