The first runners-up spot this week goes to Eric Leon and his team at Latham & Watkins. They scored a rare defense verdict based on the entire fairness standard in the Delaware Court of Chancery for Cantor Fitzgerald in shareholder derivative litigation brought on behalf of shareholders BGC Partners Inc. challenging its $875 million purchase of financial and real estate brokerage Berkeley Point Financial. After five day trial last October, Vice Chancellor Lori Will last week found that although the buyer, BGC, and seller, Cantor Fitzgerald, shared a controlling stockholder, Howard Lutnick, any incentive he had to get BGC to pay a higher price hadn’t swayed the special committee formed to negotiate the sale. “The committee members—each engaged and diligent—bargained with Cantor and obtained meaningful concessions,” Will wrote. The Latham trial team also included associates Nathan Taylor, Elizabeth Morris, Rob LaCroix and Richard Frohlichstein. Joe De Simone and Michelle Annunziata of Mayer Brown represented members of the special committee.
Runners-up honors also go to lawyers at Loeb & Loeb and Troutman Pepper Hamilton Sanders who scored a major win for the State of California and the California State Lands Commission. The case in Delaware Bankruptcy Court involved the state’s efforts to decommission oil and gas wells previously operated by bankrupt oil driller and processor Venoco. After a five day bench trial in March, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey this week turned back a claim for up to $161 million brought by Venoco’s bankruptcy trust finding the state’s actions didn’t violate the Fifth Amendment or California’s Constitution and were a reasonable exercise of its police power. “This type of action by a government entity—action taken to manage a potentially hazardous situation on private property that is not being sufficiently managed by the property owner—is an exemplary illustration of [the commission’s] police power,” Dorsey wrote. The team included Marc Cohen, Steven Rosenthal, J.D. Taliaferro and Alicia Clough of Loeb & Loeb, and David Fournier and Joanna Cline of Troutman Pepper.
