This week’s New York Business Divorce presents a retrospective assessment of the state of New York law concerning LLC business divorce, including summaries of the most significant court decisions, adapted from a recent presentation at the Eileen Bransten Institute on Complex Commercial Litigation.
Continue Reading New York LLC Caselaw’s Greatest Hits
If you want to challenge a proposed freeze-out merger that will extinguish your shares of a New York corporation, this week’s post gives you the playbook.
Continue Reading How to Stop a Cash-Out Merger from Cancelling Your Shares
In this week’s New York Business Divorce, read about a rare punitive damages award in a business divorce case after a majority owner misappropriated a 25% interest in a sushi restaurant, secretly transferred the entity’s assets to another he owned, then dissolved the original, all unbeknownst to the minority owner.
Continue Reading Bad Things Can Happen When You Steal a Business from a Minority Co-Owner
Test your business divorce chops with a pop quiz in this week’s New York Business divorce featuring a series of questions involving cash-out mergers, fiduciary duty, and judicial dissolution of LLCs and close corporations.
Continue Reading Take the Business Divorce Pop Quiz!
Most practitioners believe the summary judgment in lieu of complaint statute, CPLR 3213, applies just to contracts involving loans or other indebtedness. Not so. In a recent decision, a Manhattan Commercial Division Justice granted summary judgment in lieu of complaint, entering a money judgment for nearly $35 million, based upon a seldom litigated provision of the statute permitting accelerated treatment “upon any judgment” – in this case, a prior declaratory judgment. Read about the Court’s novel approach to summary judgment in lieu of complaint in this week New York Business Divorce.
Continue Reading Summary Judgment in Lieu of Complaint Meets Business Divorce
In this week’s New York Business Divorce, read about the outcomes of two pre-answer dismissal motions in parallel lawsuits commenced by the founding shareholder of a family-owned corporation challenging a cash-out merger initiated against him by the second-generation owners, including his cousins and nephew.
Continue Reading Questions Abound in Parallel Cash-Out Merger Rescission / Fair Value Appraisal Lawsuits
This week’s New York Business Divorce is a follow-up to last week’s article, a piece about the enormously important appellate decision in the Farro case, the first to carefully consider the correct meaning and interpretation of New York’s LLC merger statute and its relation to the analogous corporation merger statute. In this week’s article, learn about the rest of the story in the Farro litigation, addressed in two companion appellate decisions issued the same day.
Continue Reading The Farro Litigation: The Rest of the Story
In a long-awaited decision handed down last week by the Appellate Division, Second Department, the court construed two sections of New York’s LLC Law in a significant boost to the ability of members with voting control to remove minority members by means of a cash-out merger. Learn more in this week’s New York Business Divorce.
Continue Reading Groundbreaking Appellate Ruling Boosts LLC Cash-Out Mergers
“Rank pretext will not do.” With those words, a Manhattan judge preliminarily enjoined a freeze-out merger in the absence of credible evidence that the merger advanced a general corporate purpose. Get the full story in this week’s New York Business Divorce.
Continue Reading “Rank Pretext Will Not Do”: Court Enjoins Freeze-Out Merger With No Corporate Benefit
In this week’s New York Business Divorce, we go step-by-step through a tricky process, confusing to many: the procedures leading up to the commencement of a fair value appraisal proceeding.
Continue Reading How to Initiate a Fair Value Appraisal Proceeding – a Dissenter’s Checklist