DealLawyers.com Blog

December 17, 2014

The Comverge Case: Fiduciary Duties and Break-Up Fees in M&A

Here’s a blog by Richard Renck of Duane Morris:

In In re Comverge, Inc. Shareholders Litig., C.A. No. 7368-VCP, a decision on a motion to dismiss by Court of Chancery, Vice Chancellor Parsons provided practitioners and clients with a thorough and helpful analysis (essentially a road-map) of how the Court of Chancery reviews challenges to third-party sale transactions, that are approved by a disinterested board, under the enhanced scrutiny of Revlon.

In addition to the primer on a Revlon analysis, the opinion is worth a read for its discussion of what the Court considers the outer bounds for break-up fees. The Vice Chancellor allowed claims challenging the break-up fees in this transaction to go forward because, when viewed in the aggregate, they could total north of 11% of the equity value. For purposes of this motion, the Vice Chancellor accepted the plaintiff’s argument that a convertible note held by the buyer, if converted, could add more than $3 million to the purchase price if another bidder emerged, and thus should be considered an enhancer of the termination fees. The Vice Chancellor held he could not dismiss this claims because it is reasonably conceivable that the plaintiffs might be able to show that this decision by the board was so far out of bounds as to be only explainable as “bad faith”—and thus not exculpable under a Section 102(b)(7) exculpatory clause.

This blog by Jill Radloff also notes how this decision upholds the use of exclusivity agreements…