Current State of Play with SPAC Litigation and Available Insurance Coverage

Today, Lynda A. Bennett and Heather Weaver of Lowenstein’s Insurance Recovery Group sit down with Yelena Dunaevsky, Senior Vice President, Transactional Insurance, at Woodruff Sawyer to talk about the current state of SPAC related litigation and its impact on the insurance market. After a SPAC frenzy in 2020 which then slowed by 2022, SPACs appear to be popular again; Dunaevsky says these transactions still offer a good alternative to IPOs when conducted correctly, and that she expects a healthy market in the SPAC vehicle from now on. The lawyers also discuss the litigation that arose from the earlier SPACs craze, such as securities class actions and fiduciary duty cases in Delaware over issues such as misleading or fraudulent disclosures about a product, misrepresentation of revenue or growth, deceptive or fraudulent disclosures, and accounting issues. They all agree that D&O insurance is crucial for all entities involved to cover alleged wrongful acts occurring up until the closing, claims made during the time period following the transaction for wrongful acts that took place before the transaction closed, and go-forward coverage for the surviving entity; and they address a potentially helpful new structure called a combined policy for post-merge, which creates prior acts coverage for the D&Os of the original SPAC.

Speakers:

Lynda A. Bennett, Partner and Chair, Insurance Recovery
Heather Weaver, Counsel, Insurance Recovery
Yelena Dunaevsky, Esq. Senior Vice President, Transactional Insurance, Woodruff Sawyer