The Delaware Supreme Court recently addressed the standard to determine when an individual may be held in contempt for the violation of a court order by a company that person controls. I provided an overview of the decision for my latest article for the current issue of  The Bencher, the flagship publication of the American Inns of Court. The article is reprinted below with their permission.

The Delaware Supreme Court recently had occasion to address the standard to determine when a person who controls an entity—for example, through ownership of all or most of the stock of a corporation—can be personally responsible for contempt of court penalties when the corporation’s actions are in violation of a court order.

In the matter styled TransPerfect Global Inc. v. Pincus, Del. Supr., No. 154, 2021 (June 1, 2022), Delaware’s highest court reviewed the latest appeal in a long-running bitter battle that entered the Delaware court system in 2014 with a petition under Delaware General Corporation Law Section 226 to appoint a custodian to resolve a deadlock between two co-owners who were formerly engaged to be married and who each held 50% ownership of a translation and litigation-support company. They continued to co-manage their company, in a contentious manner, despite calling off their nuptials.

Procedural Background

For purposes of this short ethics column, instead of reviewing the four prior Supreme Court decisions concerning this case, and about a dozen rulings of the Delaware Court of Chancery over almost a decade, as well as several cases filed in a few other states, suffice it to say that the limited aspect of the appeal that this column focuses on is a suit filed by TransPerfect in Nevada that was in violation of an order by the Delaware Court of Chancery requiring all disputes related to this matter to be filed in the Court of Chancery.

After the appointment of a custodian to break the deadlock, one of the 50% owners bought the other half of the company to become essentially the 100% owner (the “controller”). The controller was not a named plaintiff in the Nevada lawsuit. But the Court of Chancery found the controller in contempt for the company’s filing of that lawsuit, which the trial court held to be a violation of a prior order, as explained in a 135-page opinion by the Court of Chancery.

Key Standards of Contempt Clarified

Delaware’s High Court began its careful analysis with a recitation of the fundamentals on which a finding of civil contempt is based, with copious footnotes to authorities that describe the prerequisites and the nuances involved in such a “weighty sanction.” Slip op. at 22–23 and footnotes 99–101 and 127.

A trial court must explain how an individual personally violated a court order to satisfy the standard to hold a person in contempt of a court order. Specifically, there must be evidence in the record that a person who controls a company personally violated a court order, for example by directing a company he or she controls to violate that court order. In this particular appeal, there was no such evidence in the record.

For clarification and guidance, the Delaware Supreme Court explained that “to find a corporate officer or shareholder in civil contempt of a court order, the trial court must specifically determine that the officer or shareholder bore personal responsibility for the contemptuous conduct.” Slip op. at 33. The court observed that this requirement is consistent with the prerequisite that “when an asserted violation of a court order is the basis for contempt, the party to be sanctioned must be bound by the order, have clear notice of it, and nevertheless violate it in a meaningful way.” Id. at 33–34.

Although the sanctions for contempt were properly applied to the company, the criteria for imposing penalties for contempt on the controller were not satisfied, based on the appellate record. Therefore, the penalties imposed on the controller for contempt were vacated.

This decision will be helpful for anyone who needs to determine if a person who controls a company may also be personally liable for actions taken by the company that may violate a court order.

Francis G.X. Pileggi, Esquire, is the managing partner of the Delaware office of Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP. His email address is Francis.Pileggi@LewisBrisbois.com. For the past 17 years, he has commented on key corporate and commercial decisions, as well as legal ethics, at www.DelawareLitigation.com.