Writing Delaware employment agreements

I recently wrote about new resources for identifying California Employment Agreements to use in your business, or for drafting documents for your clients.  The rationale is clear – negotiating effective employment agreements that are applicable to your jurisdiction is essential to enforcing your rights appropriately.  Additionally, the ability to leverage legal agreements drafted by top law firms enables business owners and lawyers alike to find new ways of constructing deal terms or simply getting documents turned around more quickly.

This of course applies to many state jurisdictions within the United States, not the least of which is the ability to quickly find and browse across thousands of Delaware employment agreements.  These documents are particularly likely to have been drafted by top law firms, as large corporations tend to be disproportionately organized under Delaware law. 

If you need to find Delaware employment agreements using full text search criteria or other tools, such as limiting searches to particular industries, you can do that as well using these employment agreement search tools.

Yahoo’s severance plan – protecting your business or playing dirty?

On Monday, June 2, a Delaware judge unsealed redacted portions of Yahoo’s Change of Control Employee Severance Plan originally filed with the SEC in February. 

For background, the plan was originally enacted in the midst of the Microsoft efforts to acquire Yahoo, which have recently geared up again.  Release of the confidential items shows that the plan, which would have come into play in the event of a qualifying event such as an acquisition by Microsoft, would have added between $500 million to $2.4 billion in acquisition costs to Microsoft.

In defense of Yahoo executives, they laid out a number of rational objectives for enacting the plan, not the least of which is that it would keep large numbers of employees from bailing out at the first opportunity given all the uncertainty around the company’s future.  Shareholders, many of which wanted to increase shareholder value or find an exit due to Yahoo’s struggles over the past several years, have filed suit, alleging among other things that this was an attempt to thwart the acquisition, rather than just protect the company from losing critical employees. 

In balancing these competing interests, it will ultimately come down to how reasonable the plan is.  An easy way to see this is to compare the plan to other Change of Control Agreements and Employee Severance Plans.  You can find thousands of these at www.RealDealDocs.com.

So what do you think – a righteous and reasonable effort to prevent defections, or a nefarious scheme to deter Microsoft and maintain control of the company?