DELL’S DELAWARE DEAL - Dude, you’re getting a (record shareholder settlement payout from) Dell. As Law.com’s Ellen Bardash reports, Dell Technologies Inc. agreed Wednesday to pay $1 billion in cash rather than go to trial next month to defend allegations that its directors breached their fiduciary duties to certain stockholders. It’s likely the largest shareholder settlement ever recorded in the Delaware Court of Chancery. If approved, the settlement would be nearly four times what shareholders recovered in 2015 in a derivative action involving Activision Blizzard Inc., which at $275 million is the largest shareholder settlement ever approved in Delaware. Attorneys with Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan and Labaton Sucharow are co-lead counsel for plaintiffs in the Dell case, who held a total of about 200 million shares of company stock, with additional representation from Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, Friedman Oster & Tejtel and Andrews & Springer. Quinn Emanuel partner Silpa Maruri said the settlement should put other corporations on notice. “It’s a historic victory in terms of its size, and because of that, it sends a strong message about corporate governance norms to controllers,” Maruri said. “Both of those things are key pieces of the puzzle here. This is one for the textbooks. I think this is going to be cited over and over again.”
CAPTAIN AHABS OF INDUSTRY - Call me Ishmael, but it seems like the office return has become law firm leaders’ white whale. Surveys have consistently shown that most lawyers and staff don’t want attendance mandates. Neither financial nor productivity data supports attendance mandates. And yet, a number of law firm heads appear to still be unhealthily obsessed with dragging everyone back to the office kicking and screaming—y’know, for the culture. “Law firm leaders are looking forward to the increased leverage they’ll have if the economics get bad, to ask people to be in the office more, and there will be more of a seller’s market,” Marci Taylor, a consultant at Withum, told Law.com’s Andrew Maloney earlier this week. Meanwhile, Jim Jones, a former managing partner of Arnold & Porter and now senior director of Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center, told Maloney that firms are having a very difficult time enforcing attendance mandates, which has left them “struggling with ‘What the hell do we do about this?’” But, as we write in our latest Law.com Trendspotter column, perhaps the better question is “Why the hell do we care so much about this?” I’m interested to hear from you: What is the real reason so many law firm leaders are still pushing so hard to increase office attendance? Let me know at [email protected].
