As I have said in the past, when the number of cases published by the court converges with my busy schedule in a way that creates a time crunch, I will make much shorter references than usual to the new cases and the issues they address. This is such an occasion. The reader can then access the full opinions to obtain more details of the decision.
Romero v. Career Education Corporation. This Chancery Court decision emphasizes how difficult it is to have a Section 220 case dismissed on a Rule 12(b)(6) standard in light of all the factual inferences that must be made in favor of the claimant to the extent that a determination of a “proper purpose” under Section 220 is sought to be defeated at the initial pleadings stages. [post continued below].

A key factor in the Romero case is that the court determined that despite other pending class actions against the same company, neither the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 nor the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act of 1998 preempted Section 220, and therefore the court denied the request that the Section 220 Action be stayed pending the outcome of the Federal securities class actions against the same corporation, or at least until a determination was made about whether those class actions would go forward.
In, Bateman v. 317 Rehoboth Avenue, LLC, the court interpreted an old version of the Delaware Landlord Tenant Code. Although Title 25 of the Delaware Code no longer applies to commercial leases, with very limited exception, the analysis is still useful for purposes of determining whether the right of first refusal in a commercial lease survived the expiration of that lease when the lease was merely continued on a month to month basis, after its expiration and before the right was exercised.
In Wolf v. Triangle Broadcasting Co., LLC, et al., the counterclaimant waited almost a full year after a Rule 41 dismissal, thus, the court ruled that it could not satisfy the high threshold under Rule 60 for re-opening a case after dismissal. All the decisions are available at the Chancery Court’s website.