Manhattan federal judge Kevin Castel dismissed claims relating to BofA's decision to keep mum about mounting Merrill losses, but he said investors had adequately established scienter with regard to BofA's failure to disclose a multibillion dollar Merrill bonus pool.

Shareholder M&A litigation is keeping a lot of lawyers awfully busy these days, especially in Delaware. But plaintiffs lawyers looking for guidance on a key provision of Delaware law related to such cases were turned away by the state's highest court this week, leaving them on the sidelines of derivative litigation over a $9 billion deal involving Freeport-McMoRan.

Plaintiffs achieved an unprecedented victory in the courts of Delaware on Monday, when the state's Supreme Court upheld a $2 billion award and attorney fees of $304 million in the Southern Peru derivative litigation. But the numbers don't capture another striking anomaly: The court failed to hold liable the parties that it thought were really responsible for the ill-fated deal at the heart of the case.

Kessler Topaz and Prickett, Jones & Elliott, fresh from winning a record $305 million attorney fee award in the Delaware Court of Chancery, want a judge to rule that companies can't adopt bylaws restricting shareholder suits to be filed exclusively in the Delaware court without first holding a shareholder vote. "Bring it on," says former SEC Commissioner Joseph Grundfest of Stanford Law, who's been championing such provisions.