In assessing the soundness of valuations, courts in a variety of cases have been paying close attention to the management projections appraisers have used or decided not to use in performing their value analyses. If courts are scrutinizing projections for reliability and plausibility, experts hoping to prevail in the litigation context must do so as well. 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 >>

A recent ESOP decision involving allegations of breach of fiduciary duty and engaging in a prohibited transaction turned on whether the ESOP trustee’s financial advisor had performed proper due diligence and issued defensible fairness and valuation analyses. 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 >>