This week’s New York Business Divorce offers its annual Winter Case Notes with synopses of four recent decisions by Supreme Court Justices Elizabeth Emerson, Stephen Bucaria, and Charles Ramos in cases involving partnership, close corporation, and LLC disputes.
Continue Reading Winter Case Notes: De Facto Partnership and Other Recent Decisions of Interest

Stock transfer restrictions in closely held corporations are routinely upheld by courts. So are increases in authorized shares that treat existing shareholders uniformly. But sometimes, as in the case highlighted in this week’s New York Business Divorce, the combined effect of the two may breach duties owed by controllers to the minority.
Continue Reading Too Clever By Half? Court Permits Suit Challenging Share Increase Tied to Transfer Restrictions

This week’s New York Business Divorce highlights an unusual corporate dissolution case in which a tie-break provision in the shareholders agreement of 50/50 shareholders gave one of them the decisive vote in the event of board deadlock, which in turn doomed the other’s deadlock dissolution petition.
Continue Reading Tie-Breaker in Shareholders Agreement Defeats Deadlock Dissolution Petition

This week’s New York Business Divorce highlights a recent decision by Justice Richard Platkin in a case involving a fractured family-owned business where the deaths of two shareholders before and during litigation triggered a consequential change in control.
Continue Reading Death of a Shareholder

This week’s New York Business Divorce travels upstate, to Buffalo, where a most interesting dispute between 50/50 members of a realty company has played out in litigation before Justice Timothy Walker, focusing on the rights of the non-managing member to bring a derivative summary eviction proceeding against the LLC’s sole tenant.
Continue Reading Not Your Father’s Derivative Action