In a forthcoming law review article expected to be published in 2015 in the Washington University Law Review, “Appraisal Arbitrage and the Future of Public Company M&A,” Charles Korsmo (Associate Professor at Brooklyn Law School) and Minor Myers (Associate Professor at Brooklyn Law School) report their findings showing a large uptick in the number of appraisal petitions being filed, as well as a marked increase in the size of the petitioners’ holdings and an increased level of sophistication among the filers themselves. The authors observe an increased use of arbitrage by which petitioners appear to invest in the target after the M&A deal is announced (for more about arbitrage, see our prior post here). While the authors note that the defense community has decried appraisal arbitrage as an abusive exercise of appraisal rights that ought to be suppressed, the authors argue that this criticism has it precisely backward and that the “new world of appraisal” should be welcomed and encouraged, as it ultimately provides an efficient means for benefiting minority shareholders and actually reducing the cost of raising equity capital.
Among the highly telling data points that Professors Korsmo and Myers collected for their analysis, they found that the value of claims in appraisal in 2013 was nearly $1.5 billion, a tenfold increase from 2004 and nearly 1% of the equity value of all merger activity in 2013. They attribute this surge in appraisal claims to the increased use of appraisal arbitrage in a manner that is transforming what this blog has repeatedly described as an underutilized shareholder remedy into a specialized investment strategy.