This List of Shareholder Rights Lawyers are legal firms specializing in Mergers & Acquisitions and often acting on behalf of private shareholders.
When an offer is made to a target firm to purchase all its shares in a takeover, the Board of Directors of the target firm have a fiduciary duty to obtain the best value for the shareholders. However, for a variety of reasons this may not always be the case. In these instances, legal firms such as those listed below offer their services such as securities class action litigation to target shareholders in the hope of obtaining better value from the acquirer. For example, Kahn Swick & Foti, LLC are currently investigating the proposed sale of Eaton Vance (EV) to Morgan Stanley (MS).
These Shareholder Rights Lawyers can be of significant interest to the merger arbitrage trader and those employing an event driven investment strategy. As well as being involved in appraisal rights and dissenters rights, legal firms and attorneys such as these may delay the expected closing date of an M&A deal whilst trying to encourage a superior proposal. What may have at first appeared to be a plain vanilla deal with an attractive return could become bogged down in legal wranglings and restrict the potential annualized return.
However, many of these issues raised by the Shareholder Rights Lawyers listed are resolved during the normal course of the deal closing period. Details are often available in 8-K Filings made with the SEC by the target firm.
