A protracted Minnesota buyout dispute involving the heirs to a local grocery store empire, Lunds & Byerlys, may have reached the end following a recent ruling from the state appeals court. The reviewing court upheld the trial court’s decision to grant the minority shareholder’s request for a buyout as well as the court's fair value determination. Read more >>

After the petitioners in a statutory appraisal action recently lost big, they undertook a multifaceted assault on the Delaware Court of Chancery’s decision to use the unaffected market price as the indicator of value. Their motion for reargument went nowhere. Read more >>

Recent rulings from the Delaware Supreme Court make it seem as if the discounted cash flow analysis has lost its top ranking among valuation methodologies in statutory appraisals involving publicly traded companies. Not exactly. Read more >>

The Delaware Court of Chancery recently had an opportunity to put into practice the directives the state’s high court had issued in DFC Global and Dell in terms of calculating fair value in a statutory appraisal proceeding. Read more >>

Twice, in 2017, the Delaware Supreme Court struck down statutory appraisal rulings by the Delaware Court of Chancery that dismissed the importance of the market price. Read more >>

Management projections are the sine qua non of a discounted cash flow analysis, and, in a recent statutory appraisal action involving the pet product giant PetSmart, the Delaware Court of Chancery found they did not cut the mustard. The court called the projections, “at best, fanciful,” and concluded the most accurate measure of fair value was the merger consideration. Read more >>

The use of the Delaware block method in Tennessee recently came under attack in a case involving a closely held Nashville, Tenn.-based media company whose controlling shareholders had pursued a squeeze-out merger and later asked the trial court for a judicial appraisal of the dissenting shareholders' interest. Read more >>

In a statutory appraisal action, the Delaware Court of Chancery recently found the deal price did not reflect fair value because the sales process was suboptimal. Certain other methods the parties' experts used also were inadequate to the task, the court said. Read more >>

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps Chancellor Bouchard thought of Aristotle when he recently ruled in a statutory appraisal action that, even though the results of three common valuation techniques were unreliable indicators of value, in combination they established fair value. Read more >>

In reviewing one of the Delaware Court of Chancery's most noteworthy rulings from 2015, one judge on the state Supreme Court wrote a stinging critique of the trial court's analysis. Read more >>

It decided to give no weight to the final merger price—$13.75 per share, and a special $0.13 dividend issued to all shareholders—but rely exclusively on its own post-transaction DCF analysis to determine the fair value of the company. In so doing, the court deviated from a number of Chancery decisions—several issued in 2015—that found the deal price was the most reliable indicator of the company’s fair value. Read more >>