One of the basic exposures that corporate directors and officers face is the risk of a shareholder derivative lawsuit. In the following guest post, Greg Markel, Giovanna Ferrari, and Sarah Fedner, all of the Seyfarth Shaw law firm, take a look at the basic features of shareholder derivative suits and conclude with ten basic takeaways for boards and others. I would like to thank the authors for allowing me to publish their article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this site’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is the authors’ article.Continue Reading Guest Post: Derivative Litigation: Board Lessons and Takeaways

wendysCyber-breach related D&O lawsuits have not fared particularly well. Indeed, after the shareholder derivative lawsuit against the board of Home Depot was recently dismissed, it was unclear what the future direction for cybersecurity litigation against corporate officials might be. But though the future direction of this type of litigation is unclear, it seemed unlikely despite the poor track record that we had seen the last of these cases. Among other things, it seemed likely that entrepreneurial plaintiffs’ lawyers would continue to try to identify their litigation opportunity for these kinds of cases. As it has now turned out, we didn’t have to wait long for confirmation that despite the dismissals we had not seen the last of the cyber breach-related D&O lawsuits. 
Continue Reading Data Breach-Related Shareholder Derivative Lawsuit Filed Against Wendy’s

Richard Bortnick (2)The derivative lawsuit filed against the board of Wyndham Worldwide Corporation in connection with the series of cyber breaches the company had experienced was being closely watched as possibly representative of a potential new area liability exposure for corporate directors and officers. However, as I discussed in a prior post (here), on October