In a recent post, I discussed the lawsuit filed in a UK court by the environmental advocacy group ClientEarth against the board of Shell. In the following guest post, Francis Kean, Partner in Financial Lines Team at McGill and Partners, dives deeper into the legal context of the lawsuit and its insurance implications. I would like to thank Francis for allowing me to publish his article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors of topics of interest to this blog’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Francis’s article.Continue Reading Guest Post: Client Earth Claim Against the Board of Shell: A Sign of Things to Come in the UK?
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In recent years, plaintiffs’ lawyers have filed a number of management liability lawsuits against the executives of companies that have experienced high-profile data breaches. These lawsuits have either been filed as shareholder derivative lawsuits or securities class action lawsuits. By and large, the cases filed as shareholder derivative lawsuits have been unsuccessful. However, in a development that represents a milestone in several different respects, the parties to the Yahoo data breach-related derivative lawsuit have agreed to settle the case for $29 million. As discussed below, this settlement may have important implications for future data breach-related derivative litigation. The Court’s January 4, 2019 order approving the settlement can be found 
More recent data breach-related D&O lawsuits have been filed in the form of securities class actions, one of which, the Yahoo securities class action lawsuit, recently 
For some time now, many commentators, including me, have been predicting that cybersecurity-related litigation could become an important part of the D&O litigation environment. And that may yet happen. For now, however, the results in the recent cybersecurity-related cases have been, from the plaintiffs’ perspective, not particularly promising. On July 7, 2016, in the latest of these cases to hit the skids, District of Minnesota Judge Paul Magnuson, in reliance on the report of the special litigation committee appointed to investigate the claims and in the absence of opposition from the plaintiff, granted the motions of the special litigation committee and of the defendants and dismissed the consolidated cybersecurity-related derivative litigation that had been filed against Target Corporation’s board. As discussed below, the plaintiffs’ track record in this type of litigation has been poor, which does raise the question whether this type of litigation will become a significant phenomenon. A copy of Judge Magnuson’s order in the Target Corp. case can be found 
