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Does The Quality Of The Plaintiffs' Law Firm Matter In Deal Litigation?, David H. Webber, Adam B. Badawi
Does The Quality Of The Plaintiffs' Law Firm Matter In Deal Litigation?, David H. Webber, Adam B. Badawi
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines how the stock market reacts to the filing of lawsuits against mergers and acquisitions targets as the quality of the plaintiffs’ law firm varies. Our primary dataset includes all cases of this type filed in the Delaware Chancery Court from November 2003–September 2008. We group the law firms that file these suits into higher and lower quality categories using several quantitative and qualitative measures. We hypothesize that target firm share value should reflect the likelihood that litigation will result in an increase in merger consideration. This effect is likely to depend, at least in part, on law …
Private Policing Of Mergers & Acquisitions: An Empirical Assessment Of Institutional Lead Plaintiffs In Transactional Class And Derivative Actions, David H. Webber
Private Policing Of Mergers & Acquisitions: An Empirical Assessment Of Institutional Lead Plaintiffs In Transactional Class And Derivative Actions, David H. Webber
Faculty Scholarship
Transactional class and derivative actions have long been controversial in both the popular and the academic literatures. Yet, the debate over such litigation has thus far neglected to consider a change in legal technology, adopted in Delaware a dozen years ago, favoring selection of institutional investors as lead plaintiffs in these cases. This Article fills that gap, offering new insights into the utility of mergers and acquisitions litigation. Based on a hand-collected dataset of all Delaware class and derivative actions filed from November 1, 2003 to December 31, 2009, I find that institutional investors play as large of a role …