Business Judgment Rule

In re The Walt Disney Co. Derivative Litigation

907 A.2d 693 (Del. Ch. 2005)

JACOBS, Justice:

[The Walt Disney Company hired Ovitz as its executive president and as a board member for five years after lengthy compensation negotiations. The negotiations regarding Ovitz’s compensation were conducted predominantly by Eisner and two of the members of the compensation committee (a four-member panel). The terms of Ovitz’s compensation were then presented to the full board. In a meeting lasting around one hour, where a variety of topics were discussed, the board approved Ovitz’s compensation after reviewing only a term sheet rather than the full contract. Ovitz’s time at Disney was tumultuous and short-lived.]…In December 1996, only fourteen months after he commenced employment, Ovitz was terminated without cause, resulting in a severance payout to Ovitz valued at approximately $ 130 million. [Disney shareholders then filed derivative actions on behalf of Disney against Ovitz and the directors of Disney at the time of the events complained of (the “Disney defendants”), claiming that the $130 million severance payout was the product of fiduciary duty and contractual breaches by Ovitz and of breaches of fiduciary duty by the Disney defendants and a waste of assets. The Chancellor found in favor of the defendants. The plaintiff appealed.]

We next turn to the claims of error that relate to the Disney defendants. Those claims are subdivisible into two groups: (A) claims arising out of the approval of the OEA [Ovitz employment agreement] and of Ovitz’s election as President; and (B) claims arising out of the NFT [nonfault termination] severance payment to Ovitz upon his termination. We address separately those two categories and the issues that they generate.……[The due care] argument is best understood against the backdrop of the presumptions that cloak director action being reviewed under the business judgment standard. Our law presumes that “in making a business decision the directors of a corporation acted on an informed basis, in good faith, and in the honest belief that the action taken was in the best interests of the company.” Those presumptions can be rebutted if the plaintiff shows that the directors breached their fiduciary duty of care or of loyalty or acted in bad faith. If that is shown, the burden then shifts to the director defendants to demonstrate that the challenged act or transaction was entirely fair to the corporation and its shareholders.…

The appellants’ first claim is that the Chancellor erroneously (i) failed to make a “threshold determination” of gross negligence, and (ii) “conflated” the appellants’ burden to rebut the business judgment presumptions, with an analysis of whether the directors’ conduct fell within the 8 Del. C. § 102(b)(7) provision that precludes exculpation of directors from monetary liability “for acts or omissions not in good faith.” The argument runs as follows: Emerald Partners v. Berlin required the Chancellor first to determine whether the business judgment rule presumptions were rebutted based upon a showing that the board violated its duty of care, i.e., acted with gross negligence. If gross negligence were established, the burden would shift to the directors to establish that the OEA was entirely fair. Only if the directors failed to meet that burden could the trial court then address the directors’ Section 102(b)(7) exculpation defense, including the statutory exception for acts not in good faith.

This argument lacks merit. To make the argument the appellants must ignore the distinction between (i) a determination of bad faith for the threshold purpose of rebutting the business judgment rule presumptions, and (ii) a bad faith determination for purposes of evaluating the availability of charter-authorized exculpation from monetary damage liability after liability has been established. Our law clearly permits a judicial assessment of director good faith for that former purpose. Nothing in Emerald Partners requires the Court of Chancery to consider only evidence of lack of due care (i.e. gross negligence) in determining whether the business judgment rule presumptions have been rebutted.…

The appellants argue that the Disney directors breached their duty of care by failing to inform themselves of all material information reasonably available with respect to Ovitz’s employment agreement.…[but the] only properly reviewable action of the entire board was its decision to elect Ovitz as Disney’s President. In that context the sole issue, as the Chancellor properly held, is “whether [the remaining members of the old board] properly exercised their business judgment and acted in accordance with their fiduciary duties when they elected Ovitz to the Company’s presidency.” The Chancellor determined that in electing Ovitz, the directors were informed of all information reasonably available and, thus, were not grossly negligent. We agree.

…[The court turns to good faith.] The Court of Chancery held that the business judgment rule presumptions protected the decisions of the compensation committee and the remaining Disney directors, not only because they had acted with due care but also because they had not acted in bad faith. That latter ruling, the appellants claim, was reversible error because the Chancellor formulated and then applied an incorrect definition of bad faith.

…Their argument runs as follows: under the Chancellor’s 2003 definition of bad faith, the directors must have “consciously and intentionally disregarded their responsibilities, adopting a ‘we don’t care about the risks’ attitude concerning a material corporate decision.” Under the 2003 formulation, appellants say, “directors violate their duty of good faith if they are making material decisions without adequate information and without adequate deliberation[,]” but under the 2005 post-trial definition, bad faith requires proof of a subjective bad motive or intent. This definitional change, it is claimed, was procedurally prejudicial because appellants relied on the 2003 definition in presenting their evidence of bad faith at the trial.…

Second, the appellants claim that the Chancellor’s post-trial definition of bad faith is erroneous substantively. They argue that the 2003 formulation was (and is) the correct definition, because it is “logically tied to board decision-making under the duty of care.” The post-trial formulation, on the other hand, “wrongly incorporated substantive elements regarding the rationality of the decisions under review rather than being constrained, as in a due care analysis, to strictly procedural criteria.” We conclude that both arguments must fail.

The appellants’ first argument—that there is a real, significant difference between the Chancellor’s pre-trial and post-trial definitions of bad faith—is plainly wrong. We perceive no substantive difference between the Court of Chancery’s 2003 definition of bad faith—a “conscious and intentional disregard [of] responsibilities, adopting a we don’t care about the risks’ attitude…”—and its 2005 post-trial definition—an “intentional dereliction of duty, a conscious disregard for one’s responsibilities.” Both formulations express the same concept, although in slightly different language.

The most telling evidence that there is no substantive difference between the two formulations is that the appellants are forced to contrive a difference. Appellants assert that under the 2003 formulation, “directors violate their duty of good faith if they are making material decisions without adequate information and without adequate deliberation.” For that ipse dixitthey cite no legal authority. That comes as no surprise because their verbal effort to collapse the duty to act in good faith into the duty to act with due care, is not unlike putting a rabbit into the proverbial hat and then blaming the trial judge for making the insertion.

…The precise question is whether the Chancellor’s articulated standard for bad faith corporate fiduciary conduct—intentional dereliction of duty, a conscious disregard for one’s responsibilities—is legally correct. In approaching that question, we note that the Chancellor characterized that definition as “anappropriate (although not the only) standard for determining whether fiduciaries have acted in good faith.” That observation is accurate and helpful, because as a matter of simple logic, at least three different categories of fiduciary behavior are candidates for the “bad faith” pejorative label.

The first category involves so-called “subjective bad faith,” that is, fiduciary conduct motivated by an actual intent to do harm. That such conduct constitutes classic, quintessential bad faith is a proposition so well accepted in the liturgy of fiduciary law that it borders on axiomatic.…The second category of conduct, which is at the opposite end of the spectrum, involves lack of due care—that is, fiduciary action taken solely by reason of gross negligence and without any malevolent intent. In this case, appellants assert claims of gross negligence to establish breaches not only of director due care but also of the directors’ duty to act in good faith. Although the Chancellor found, and we agree, that the appellants failed to establish gross negligence, to afford guidance we address the issue of whether gross negligence (including a failure to inform one’s self of available material facts), without more, can also constitute bad faith. The answer is clearly no.

…”issues of good faith are (to a certain degree) inseparably and necessarily intertwined with the duties of care and loyalty.…” But, in the pragmatic, conduct-regulating legal realm which calls for more precise conceptual line drawing, the answer is that grossly negligent conduct, without more, does not and cannot constitute a breach of the fiduciary duty to act in good faith. The conduct that is the subject of due care may overlap with the conduct that comes within the rubric of good faith in a psychological sense, but from a legal standpoint those duties are and must remain quite distinct.…

The Delaware General Assembly has addressed the distinction between bad faith and a failure to exercise due care (i.e., gross negligence) in two separate contexts. The first is Section 102(b)(7) of the DGCL, which authorizes Delaware corporations, by a provision in the certificate of incorporation, to exculpate their directors from monetary damage liability for a breach of the duty of care. That exculpatory provision affords significant protection to directors of Delaware corporations. The statute carves out several exceptions, however, including most relevantly, “for acts or omissions not in good faith.…” Thus, a corporation can exculpate its directors from monetary liability for a breach of the duty of care, but not for conduct that is not in good faith. To adopt a definition of bad faith that would cause a violation of the duty of care automatically to become an act or omission “not in good faith,” would eviscerate the protections accorded to directors by the General Assembly’s adoption of Section 102(b)(7).

A second legislative recognition of the distinction between fiduciary conduct that is grossly negligent and conduct that is not in good faith, is Delaware’s indemnification statute, found at 8 Del. C. § 145. To oversimplify, subsections (a) and (b) of that statute permit a corporation to indemnify (inter alia) any person who is or was a director, officer, employee or agent of the corporation against expenses…where (among other things): (i) that person is, was, or is threatened to be made a party to that action, suit or proceeding, and (ii) that person “acted in good faith and in a manner the person reasonably believed to be in or not opposed to the best interests of the corporation.…” Thus, under Delaware statutory law a director or officer of a corporation can be indemnified for liability (and litigation expenses) incurred by reason of a violation of the duty of care, but not for a violation of the duty to act in good faith.

Section 145, like Section 102(b)(7), evidences the intent of the Delaware General Assembly to afford significant protections to directors (and, in the case of Section 145, other fiduciaries) of Delaware corporations. To adopt a definition that conflates the duty of care with the duty to act in good faith by making a violation of the former an automatic violation of the latter, would nullify those legislative protections and defeat the General Assembly’s intent. There is no basis in policy, precedent or common sense that would justify dismantling the distinction between gross negligence and bad faith.

That leaves the third category of fiduciary conduct, which falls in between the first two categories of (1) conduct motivated by subjective bad intent and (2) conduct resulting from gross negligence. This third category is what the Chancellor’s definition of bad faith—intentional dereliction of duty, a conscious disregard for one’s responsibilities—is intended to capture. The question is whether such misconduct is properly treated as a non-exculpable, non-indemnifiable violation of the fiduciary duty to act in good faith. In our view it must be, for at least two reasons.

First, the universe of fiduciary misconduct is not limited to either disloyalty in the classic sense (i.e., preferring the adverse self-interest of the fiduciary or of a related person to the interest of the corporation) or gross negligence. Cases have arisen where corporate directors have no conflicting self-interest in a decision, yet engage in misconduct that is more culpable than simple inattention or failure to be informed of all facts material to the decision. To protect the interests of the corporation and its shareholders, fiduciary conduct of this kind, which does not involve disloyalty (as traditionally defined) but is qualitatively more culpable than gross negligence, should be proscribed. A vehicle is needed to address such violations doctrinally, and that doctrinal vehicle is the duty to act in good faith. The Chancellor implicitly so recognized in his Opinion, where he identified different examples of bad faith as follows:

The good faith required of a corporate fiduciary includes not simply the duties of care and loyalty, in the narrow sense that I have discussed them above, but all actions required by a true faithfulness and devotion to the interests of the corporation and its shareholders. A failure to act in good faith may be shown, for instance, where the fiduciary intentionally acts with a purpose other than that of advancing the best interests of the corporation, where the fiduciary acts with the intent to violate applicable positive law, or where the fiduciary intentionally fails to act in the face of a known duty to act, demonstrating a conscious disregard for his duties. There may be other examples of bad faith yet to be proven or alleged, but these three are the most salient.

…Second, the legislature has also recognized this intermediate category of fiduciary misconduct, which ranks between conduct involving subjective bad faith and gross negligence. Section 102(b)(7)(ii) of the DGCL expressly denies money damage exculpation for “acts or omissions not in good faith or which involve intentional misconduct or a knowing violation of law.” By its very terms that provision distinguishes between “intentional misconduct” and a “knowing violation of law” (both examples of subjective bad faith) on the one hand, and “acts…not in good faith,” on the other. Because the statute exculpates directors only for conduct amounting to gross negligence, the statutory denial of exculpation for “acts…not in good faith” must encompass the intermediate category of misconduct captured by the Chancellor’s definition of bad faith.

For these reasons, we uphold the Court of Chancery’s definition as a legally appropriate, although not the exclusive, definition of fiduciary bad faith. We need go no further. To engage in an effort to craft (in the Court’s words) “a definitive and categorical definition of the universe of acts that would constitute bad faith” would be unwise and is unnecessary to dispose of the issues presented on this appeal.…

For the reasons stated above, the judgment of the Court of Chancery is affirmed.