The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu The leading online blog in the fields of corporate governance and financial regulation. Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:30:34 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.8 https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/cropped-photography-4-e1706898544564-1-32x32.png Recent Delaware Rulings Support Practice of “Appraisal Arbitrage” – The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu 32 32 Recent Delaware Rulings Support Practice of “Appraisal Arbitrage” https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2015/01/29/recent-delaware-rulings-support-practice-of-appraisal-arbitrage/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=recent-delaware-rulings-support-practice-of-appraisal-arbitrage https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2015/01/29/recent-delaware-rulings-support-practice-of-appraisal-arbitrage/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2015 14:02:02 +0000 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/?p=68035?d=20150303153921EST Editor's Note: The following post comes to us from William E. Curbow, partner in the Mergers & Acquisitions practice at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, and is based on a Simpson Thacher memorandum. This post is part of the Delaware law series, which is cosponsored by the Forum and Corporation Service Company; links to other posts in the series are available here.

In a pair of memorandum opinions written by Vice Chancellor Glasscock and decided on January 5, 2015, the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, in In Re Appraisal of Ancestry.com, Inc. and Merion Capital LP v. BMC Software, Inc., found that neither the beneficial owner nor the record owner of shares for which appraisal is sought under Section 262 of the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware is required to show that the specific shares for which it seeks appraisal have not been voted in favor of the merger in question by previous stockholders. The findings follow the analysis applied in In Re Appraisal of Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc., a 2007 case which preceded an amendment to Section 262(e) later that year permitting beneficial owners to petition for appraisal in their own name. The decisions support the practice known as “appraisal arbitrage"—a practice which has contributed to the more than tripling of incidents of appraisal petition filings in eligible deals over the past 10 years—for investors who buy stock in target companies following the record date for stockholder votes on mergers and highlight public policy considerations concerning the role of Delaware’s appraisal statute in merger transactions.

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]]> Posted by Yaron Nili, Co-editor, HLS Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation, on Thursday, January 29, 2015
Editor's Note:

The following post comes to us from William E. Curbow, partner in the Mergers & Acquisitions practice at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP, and is based on a Simpson Thacher memorandum. This post is part of the Delaware law series, which is cosponsored by the Forum and Corporation Service Company; links to other posts in the series are available here.

In a pair of memorandum opinions written by Vice Chancellor Glasscock and decided on January 5, 2015, the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware, in In Re Appraisal of Ancestry.com, Inc. and Merion Capital LP v. BMC Software, Inc., found that neither the beneficial owner nor the record owner of shares for which appraisal is sought under Section 262 of the General Corporation Law of the State of Delaware is required to show that the specific shares for which it seeks appraisal have not been voted in favor of the merger in question by previous stockholders. The findings follow the analysis applied in In Re Appraisal of Transkaryotic Therapies, Inc., a 2007 case which preceded an amendment to Section 262(e) later that year permitting beneficial owners to petition for appraisal in their own name. The decisions support the practice known as “appraisal arbitrage”—a practice which has contributed to the more than tripling of incidents of appraisal petition filings in eligible deals over the past 10 years—for investors who buy stock in target companies following the record date for stockholder votes on mergers and highlight public policy considerations concerning the role of Delaware’s appraisal statute in merger transactions.

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