This week’s New York Business Divorce involves an unusual procedural motion by a plaintiff to convert its lawsuit from a plenary action to a special proceeding under Section 1008 of the Business Corporation Law to adjudicate an individual’s shareholder’s liability for the corporation’s alleged breaches of contract and torts. May plaintiffs use BCL 1008 as an alternative to a veil piercing claim? Can corporate creditors use BCL 1008 to intervene in a judicial dissolution proceeding? Learn the answers in this week’s New York Business Divorce.
Continue Reading Defendant Dissolves Mid-Lawsuit: What’s the Creditor’s Remedy?

The interplay between the default rules of the LLC law and the members’ agreement sometimes gets complicated. In a duo of recent decisions from Justice Cohen, that interplay took center-stage when a majority of members invoked the default rules in an attempt to oust the managing member from authority. …
Continue Reading A Two-Act Play of LLC Default Rules and Manager Removal

Shareholders considering exercising their right to inspect the corporation’s books and records–particularly in the context of a valuation proceeding under BCL 1118 or 623–would be wise to consider Justice Platkin’s recent primer on different inspection rights and their correspondingly different scopes, conditions precedent, and required justifications. …
Continue Reading Justice Platkin’s Primer on Shareholders’ Inspection Rights

Pleading a derivative claim as direct, a direct claim as derivative, or intermingling direct and derivative claims, will likely invite time consuming and potentially expensive motion practice at the outset of a business divorce case. This week’s New York Business Divorce highlights the pitfalls.
Continue Reading Singin’ the Derivative Plaintiff Blues

In a case featuring your authors as counsel for the prevailing parties, NY County Commercial Division Justice Robert Reed enforces the buy-sell provision of a corporation’s shareholders agreement triggered by the shareholders’ petition for dissolution. …
Continue Reading Look Before You Leap: Buy-Sell Agreements Triggered by a Petition for Dissolution

Professor Susan Pace Hamill is one of the leading authorities on the history and evolution of LLCs and LLC jurisprudence. This week’s New York Business Divorce introduces the latest episode of the Business Divorce Roundtable podcast featuring an interview with Professor Hamill about her latest law review article entitled Some Musings as LLCs Approach the Fifty-Year Milestone.
Continue Reading LLCs as They Approach the 50-Year Milestone: A Conversation with Professor Susan Pace Hamill

In this week’s New York Business Divorce, we tackle one of the most spectacular and well-publicized business falling-outs of modern times: Michael D. Cohen’s departure from the Trump Organization LLC, his resulting criminal conviction, and his cooperation with the Federal Government’s various investigations into activities surrounding former President Trump J. Trump. As an alleged former officer of the Trump Organization, Cohen sued the company for indemnification under its operating agreement for millions of dollars in legal fees resulting from the sprawling array of civil, administrative, and criminal proceedings against him. Learn how Cohen’s claims were resolved in this week’s New York Business Divorce.
Continue Reading The Outer Limits of LLC Indemnification: Michael Cohen v Trump Organization