Litigation

Delaware Supreme Court Affirms Class Action Settlement in Philly Stock Exchange Case

By Francis G. X. Pileggi, Esq.

 In the Matter of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, Inc., (Del. Supr., March 27, 2008), read opinion here, the Delaware Supreme Court (two days ago) affirmed the Chancery Court's decision to both approve the class action settlement in the case as well as upholding the trial court's bifurcation of the settlement proceedings to address an objector's argument that the settlement proceeds were not fairly distributed among the class members. In its 44-page opinion, the Supreme Court addresses the long list of substantive and procedural objections to the settlement. Some of the objections, which the court refers to as "multitudinous" and a "plethora", were waived for not having been fairly presented to the Chancery Court, and others were rejected after careful analysis and reference, for example, to Delaware and federal cases that have allowed bifurcation to consider a settlement as a whole, and a separate proceeding to address allocation among class members. Prior Chancery Court decisions in this case were summarized here and here. One of the prior Chancery decisions in this case was cited in a recent ethics article, here, that  I published about the attorney/client relationship among class members and their lawyers.

Full post as published by Delaware Corporate and Commercial Litigation Blog on March 29, 2008 (boomark / email).