This report provides preliminary statistics for takeover litigation in 2015. Takeover litigation was substantially disrupted in 2015 by the Delaware courts' willingness to challenge "disclosure only" settlements. For the full year, lawsuits were brought in 87.7% of completed takeovers versus...

Using a hand-collected sample of 1,739 class actions that challenge the fairness of M&A transactions from the period 2003 through 2012, we examine the effectiveness of plaintiffs' law firms. From out of the 336 law firms in our sample, we determine the top law firms based on their popularity...

This report provides preliminary statistics for takeover litigation in 2014. Takeover litigation continued at a "steady state" and at an extremely high rate. Lawsuits were brought in 94.9% of takeovers in 2014 versus 39% in 2005. This is the fourth year in a row that the rate of litigation was...

The dramatic events of the financial crisis led the government to respond with a new form of regulation. Regulation by deal bent the rule of law to rescue financial institutions through transactions and forced investments; it may have helped to save the economy, but it failed to observe a...

We examine firm lifecycles of 3,081 IPOs from 1996-2012. We find that small IPOs have a different lifecycle than other, larger companies. Within five years of an IPO, only 55% of small IPOs remain listed on a public exchange, compared to 61.3% and 67.1% for middle and large capitalized...

The exogenous shock of the financial crisis made shareholders and regulators particularly attuned to financial firm performance. We thus use the financial crisis as a natural experiment to study labor market consequences for outside directors at banks and other financial companies. Examining...

We provide a multi-dimensional picture of jurisdictional competition for corporate litigation by examining merger litigation in a hand-collected sample of 1,117 takeovers from 2005-2011. We find that entrepreneurial plaintiffs' attorneys drive this competition by bringing suits in jurisdictions...

The takeover standards that we learn and teach in law school, Revlon, Unocal, Weinberger, and Blasius, appear to be in decline. In this chapter for the book The Corporate Contract In Changing Times: Is the Law Keeping Up? (eds. William Savitt, Steven Davidoff Solomon, Randall Thomas), we attempt...

This paper examines an innovative response to the rise of dual-class stock: the use of tenure voting by U.S. public companies. Tenure voting is the award of an additional number of votes to shareholders depending upon the duration of their ownership. Tenure voting has the potential to be a more...

Do social movements spur corporate change? This Article sheds new empirical and theoretical light on the issue through an original study of executive contracts before and after MeToo. The MeToo movement, beginning in early 2018, exposed a workplace culture seemingly permissive of high-level,...