This week’s first runner-up is a team at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who fended off a preliminary injunction bid seeking to block a business combination between Neuberger Berman, Owl Rock Capital and a special purpose acquisition vehicle valued at $12.5 billion. Vice Chancellor Morgan T. Zurn this week denied an injunction request by investment firm Sixth Street Partners, which claimed that the proposed deal violated provisions of an investment agreement signed when funds affiliated with Neuberger Berman’s Dyal Capital Partners took a minority equity stake in Sixth Street. “Sixth Street’s interpretation would have the court enjoin a transaction at any level of Dyal’s corporate pyramid, regardless of whether that entity was explicitly bound by the Transfer Restriction,” Zurn wrote. “This runs afoul of Delaware’s well-settled respect for and adherence to principles of corporate separateness and freedom of contract, especially in the hands of sophisticated parties that could have expressly bound Dyal III’s upstairs entities if doing so reflected their intended agreement,” the judge continued. The win comes on the heels of a decision from New York Supreme Court Justice Joel Cohen earlier this month denying a similar injunction bid brought by Golub Capital Partners, another firm Dyal funds hold a minority stake in. The Wachtell team representing Dyal Capital Partners was led by litigation group co-chair Bill Savitt and partner Steve DiPrima and the Skadden team representing Neuberger Berman was headed up by Susan Saltzstein, Scott Musoff, Christopher Malloy, and Rob Saunders.
Also getting a runner-up nod this week is a team at Cooley that got a major win at the Sixth Circuit in a habeas case that clarified that a defendants’ Confrontation Clause rights include not only “the right to cross-examine” a witness, but also “the right to share with the jury the information the cross-examination reveals.” A Sixth Circuit panel granted Dwight Miller’s habeas petition finding that a state judge in Tennessee violated the Confrontation Clause when he redacted the cross-examination transcript of an unavailable witness during his second trial for the murder of Donald Rice. The Cooley team included partner Adam Gershenson, former partner and current Acting Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, and Andrew Barr, an associate and former Sixth Circuit clerk who led the briefing and argued the matter.
