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Ann Lipton

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Ann M. Lipton is a Professor of Law and Laurence W. DeMuth Chair of Business Law at the University of Colorado Law School.  An experienced securities and corporate litigator who has handled class actions involving some of the world’s largest companies, she joined the Tulane Law faculty in 2015 after two years as a visiting assistant professor at Duke University School of Law.

As a scholar, Lipton explores corporate governance, the relationships between corporations and investors, and the role of corporations in society.  Read more.

Delaware’s Caremark cases continue to be catnip for me.

The latest is the Delaware Supreme Court’s Lebanon County Employees’ Retirement Fund v. Collis, reversing VC Laster’s decision from last year.

Plaintiffs alleged that AmerisourceBergen’s board of directors violated opioid drug laws by failing to monitor suspicious prescriptions, to the point where they altered their internal reporting systems so that fewer prescriptions would be flagged.  Ultimately, this conduct caused severe damage to the company, through a $6 billion global settlement, as well as other settlements and litigation costs.

VC Laster explored the allegations in detail, ultimately determining that, standing alone, the complaint stated a claim against the AmerisourceBergen board for a violation of Caremark duties. 

But!  Plot twist.  Because in mid 2022, after the plaintiffs’ complaint was filed, a federal West Virginia court cleared AmerisourceBergen of misconduct.  The case was filed by a city and county in West Virginia – areas that were ground zero for the opioid crisis – and among thousands of similar cases consolidated for pretrial proceedings in a larger multidistrict litigation.  After a bench trial, the judge found that the plaintiffs had failed to prove that AmerisourceBergen did not maintain an effective control system.  According…

After Twitter v. Musk concluded, there remained a bit of satellite litigation in the form of a claim brought by Twitter shareholder Luigi Crispo, who alleged that his lawsuit against Musk – filed in the midst of the dispute with Twitter – had in fact materially contributed to the Twitter v. Musk settlement, and therefore he should be entitled to attorneys’ fees. 

(Pause for laughter.)

Anyway, the legal merit of that claim turned on whether Crispo’s claims against Musk – as a stockholder, for breaching the merger agreement with Twitter – themselves ever had any merit to begin with.  In October of this year, Chancellor McCormick held that they did not, but the way she got there put merger planners in something of a bind.

One issue that came up during the whole … thing … was what kind of damages Twitter could get if it prevailed in its claim that Musk breached the merger agreement, but if specific performance was for some reason unavailable.  (And yes, sorry, I can’t help but mention, this is an issue I discuss in more detail in my paper, Every Billionaire is a Policy Failure).  The merger agreement had a damages cap…

You may already have seen the news that Judge Charles Breyer refused to dismiss claims against Elon Musk arising out of l’affaire Twitter.  Specifically, a class of shareholders alleged that Musk’s desperate efforts to get out of the deal – including his accusation of spam and his insistence that Twitter violated its contractual obligations by refusing to provide him with information – depressed the price of Twitter stock by creating uncertainty regarding closing.  As a result, some investors were harmed by selling stock too soon.  In Pampena v. Musk, 2023 WL 8588853 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 11, 2023), Judge Breyer dismissed claims based on several of Musk’s statements, but sustained others.  He reasoned:

The May 13 tweet reads as follows: “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” … Defendant represented to a reasonable investor that the Twitter deal was on hold—and would not close—until Twitter provided information supporting its bot calculations. Or, put another way, a reasonable investor could have plausibly understood that Twitter was obligated to provide Defendant with the requested information for the deal to close…. The Court finds that Defendant’s statement did give an

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Two interesting matters related to the internal affairs doctrine came up recently, and since I just wrote a whole paper on this subject, I can’t resist mentioning them here.

First, VC Laster issued an opinion in Sunder Energy v. Jackson et al,.  The question was whether certain LLC members and employees violated noncompetes included in the LLC agreement, but Laster began by railing against the trend of companies attempting to avoid the employment law of states where they do business by writing employment-related terms into entity organizational documents, and then issuing equity compensation to employees.  The companies do so apparently in hopes that the employment-related terms will then be treated as entity internal affairs matters governed by the state of organization (Delaware), rather than employment terms governed by the employee’s home state.  Sunder Energy was not the first time Laster objected to the practice; earlier, he gave a long speech on the matter in his transcript ruling in Strategic Funding Source Holdings LLC v. Kirincic, which I quoted extensively in my paper. 

Anyway, that’s not the only thing of interest in the case; it also presents an interesting cautionary tale that will work well in the…

This week, we had two interesting, and very different, decisions on the validity of anti-activist bylaws.

The first decision, out of Delaware, upheld certain advance notice bylaws in the context of a motion for a preliminary injunction, while the second, from the Second Circuit, rejected control share acquisition bylaws adopted by a closed-end mutual fund.

The first decision, Paragon Technologies v. Cryan, concerned Paragon’s activist attack on penny stock Ocean Powers Technology (OPT).  After Paragon expressed interest, OPT adopted an advance notice bylaw requiring director nominees offer a wealth of information, including any plans that would be required to be disclosed on a 13D, any business or personal interests that could create conflicts between the nominees and OPT, and any circumstances that could delay a nominee receiving security clearance, while simultaneously adopting a NOL pill (for more on those, read Christine Hurt).

Paragon submitted some documents in connection with the bylaw, but the “plans” only said it would “fix OPT.”  OPT identified numerous deficiencies in Paragon’s submission, Paragon submitted more information including that its plans were to reduce expenses and focus on industry growth.  Long story short: OPT kept finding deficiencies to complain about, and ultimately…

The big corpgov news this week is obviously L’Affaire du OpenAI, but I have no idea what I think about that so instead I’m quickly going to highlight an interesting new lawsuit filed by a retired Oklahoma pensioner, alleging that the state’s anti-ESG law violates the First Amendment, as well as both state and federal requirements.

You can find all the relevant documents at this link, but the backstory is that Oklahoma passed a law prohibiting state agencies from contracting with financial institutions that “boycott” oil and gas interests.  OPERS – the state retirement system – took advantage of an exception that allowed continued investment if necessary to fulfill fiduciary responsibilities, which then prompted some nastygrams back and forth between the State Pension Commission (headed by the Treasurer, who is on the OPERS board, but was outvoted) with OPERS itself, regarding whether OPERS qualified for the exception.

And now, a former officer of the Oklahoma Public Employees Association has sued, claiming that the state is using his retirement assets to make an (illegitimate) political statement instead of protecting retiree savings.  The lawsuit is backed by the Oklahoma Public Employees Association.

Anyway, I’m not going to express an opinion…

Back when I was in practice, so many years ago, I spent a bit of time on the IPO Cases, namely, a series of around 300 class actions involving dot-com startup IPOs that, we alleged, had been manipulated by underwriters.  Details differed from case to case, but the typical claim was that the underwriters used manipulative techniques, such as laddering, to cause dot com startups to “pop” in price upon their initial offering, thereby violating Section 10(b).

But we stumbled at class certification.  For false statements, there’s a well established paradigm for creating a classwide presumption of reliance that satisfies Rule 23.  For manipulative conduct there isn’t a paradigm, and our cases faltered.  The Second Circuit reversed one grant of class certification and remanded, In re IPO Securities Litigation, 471 F.3d 24 (2d Cir. 2006) and 483 F.3d 70 (2d Cir. 2006).  We moved for class certification a second time, and eventually matters settled.

Anyway, the recent decision denying class certification in In re January 2021 Short Squeeze Litigation, 21-2989-MDL-ALTONAGA (S.D. Fla. Nov. 13, 2023), takes me back.  It is not on Westlaw or Lexis yet, so all I can do is link the Law360 article…

Today, I am at the ILEP conference that Joan blogged about, honoring the career of Jill Fisch.  In keeping with the ESG theme of the conference, this week, I’ll make a brief observation.

For the past couple of years, there has been a rising anti-ESG backlash on the right, accusing Disney and Target and Bud Light of engaging in “woke” marketing, and seeking to bar the likes of BlackRock and other large asset managers from taking ESG factors into account.  The latest salvos are taking place in Congress, where subpoenas are being issued to groups like As You Sow, accusing them of antitrust violations, and another hearing was just held to criticize ESG investing – this time, focusing on the Department of Labor’s new rules.

Now, the thing about the anti-ESG push on the right is, it’s not making headway with voters.  Which isn’t surprising; most people don’t think much about corporate law or investing guidelines, so I’d honestly be more surprised if the anti-ESG push was getting political traction.

So when politicians continue to ostentatiously push this line, the obvious question is – why?  And my instinct has always been, despite the attention paid to DEI…

The Financial Times recently reported that

A group of veteran US financial journalists is teaming up with investors to launch a trading firm that is designed to trade on market-moving news unearthed by its own investigative reporting.

The business, founded by investor Nathaniel Brooks Horwitz and writer Sam Koppelman, would comprise two entities: a trading fund and a group of analysts and journalists producing stories based on publicly available material…

The fund would place trades before articles were published, and then publish its research and trading thesis….

I saw a lot of online commentary asking why this isn’t just a model for insider trading, and even though Matt Levine went through some of the issues here and here, I am moved to do something I rarely do and delve into insider trading law to explain the matter further.  For a lot of readers, this is probably nothing new, but hopefully this will be helpful for some of you.

So, the first thing to make clear is that the rules for what counts as insider trading in the U.S. are bizarre and arcane.  And the reason for that is, with a few exceptions like the “Eddie Murphy” provisions…

I’ve mentioned before in this space that Delaware’s increasingly baroque rules for cleansing transactions – and thus winning business judgment rule protection – are starting to resemble the MBCA in their rigidity, and are drifting from the more equity-focused caselaw of the past, where cleansing procedures were less clear and cases often seemed to turn on the court’s gut instinct about a transaction’s fairness.

So I was delighted to see Dalia Tsuk Mitchell’s new article, Proceduralism: Delaware’s Legacy.  Her thesis is that when managerialism reigned as a corporate philosophy – viewing corporate elites as a kind of enlightened guardian of the public – Delaware justified deference to their decisionmaking on the grounds of their expertise.  Later, as managerialism fell out of favor, Delaware courts developed a new narrative to justify deference, namely, procedural fairness, that was not rooted in managers’ expertise or elite status at all.  She contends that the new proceduralism, which focuses solely on firms’ internal decisionmaking process, parallels a shareholder primacist view of the world, which abandons any notion that corporate managers have responsibilities to the communities in which they operate.  

Here is the abstract:

This article examines the Delaware courts’ 1980s shift from managerialism

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