Shareholder Litigation in Delaware: An Empirical Investigation

The empirical study of shareholder litigation in state courts is a seriously underexamined subject. To remedy this gap, we collected data on all 4,741 fiduciary duty complaints filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery over a sixteen-year period, from January 1, 2004, to December 31, 2019. After remov...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inVanderbilt law review Vol. 78; no. 2; p. COV1
Main Authors Cox, James D, Thomas, Randall S, Bai, Lynn
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Vanderbilt University, School of Law 01.03.2025
Subjects
Acquisitions and mergers
Attorneys
Confidential communications
Disclosure (Securities law)
Fees
Fiduciary duties
Forecasts and trends
Laws, regulations and rules
State courts
Stockholders' derivative actions
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ISSN0042-2533

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Summary:The empirical study of shareholder litigation in state courts is a seriously underexamined subject. To remedy this gap, we collected data on all 4,741 fiduciary duty complaints filed in the Delaware Court of Chancery over a sixteen-year period, from January 1, 2004, to December 31, 2019. After removing the duplicative cases consolidated into a lead complaint, the number of unique complaints was reduced to 2,958 in our dataset. In our coding, we examined over one hundred variables (with many variables being further subdivided into as many as eight subvariables) for each of these cases, including information about the parties, claims, motions, fees, outcomes of each motion filed, and final disposition of the case.
ISSN:0042-2533