Professor Robert Reder and Vanderbilt JD candidate Blake Woodward have published a piece in the Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc reviewing the Delaware Supreme Court’s DFC decision and the intricacies of Chancellor Strine’s 85 page opinion. We’ve posted extensively about DFC throughout its history. The authors of the current piece point out that DFC can be partially read as a requirement for clearer explanations by the trial court of their reasoning with respect to valuation. The authors summarize DFC’s import when it comes to encouraging explanation by lower courts as: “when the Chancery Court is faced with a choice between the deal price and a discounted cash flow analysis as the basis for a fair value determination, a sliding metric balancing the quality of the sales process with the reliability of the projections utilized in the discounted cash flow analysis ought to be employed.”
This sliding mechanism – involving a review of the sales process that then feeds into how much weight the court gives the deal price – fits well with recent research that shows appraisal is “more likely to be filed against mergers with perceived conflicts of interest, including going-private deals, minority squeeze outs, and acquisitions with low premiums, which makes them a potentially important governance mechanism” – i.e., the kind of cases where the ‘slide’ is against a reasonably fair process.