A Wave of SPAC Litigation Is Coming. Here's What to Watch For.
Litigators at Latham & Watkins and Quinn Emanuel both expect the drastic uptick in special purpose acquisition company deal activity to spawn lawsuits. Here's where they see the fault lines.
May 11, 2021 at 07:30 AM
6 minute read
Cases and CourtsThere's a sort of unwritten rule of journalism that three of anything makes a trend. From my particular journalistic perch, when litigators at Latham & Watkins and Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan both say to look out for a particular flavor of litigation, you can go ahead and call it a trend.
Both firms held webinars last week to discuss the wave of cases they're expecting to see in the wake of all the deal activity involving special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. For those who've been skipping over the business pages for the past couple of months, let me sum up the recent SPAC explosion this way: According to Deal Point Data, the $83.3 billion in gross proceeds from SPAC transactions in 2020 was more than twice the amount from the four prior years combined. As of May 1, there had already been more than $100 billion in activity in 2021.
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