Supreme Court Affirms Liability of SIGA Technologies to PharmAthene Based on Failure to Negotiate in Good Faith
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SIGA Technologies, Inc. v. PharmAthene, Inc., Del. Supr., No. 314, 2012 (May 24, 2013). This Delaware Supreme Court decision was the subject of a BloombergBusinessweek article on Sunday, May 26. The Court of Chancery’s opinion was highlighted on these pages at this link. Also, several other prior Chancery decisions in this case were also outlined on these pages.
Issue Addressed: Is an agreement to negotiate in good faith in accordance with a term sheet an enforceable obligation?
Short Answer: Yes, and a court may award expectation damages if the record supports a finding that an agreement would have been reached but for the defendant’s bad faith negotiations. This aspect of the trial court’s 117-page decision was upheld, but Delaware’s high court reversed and remanded the damages award to reconsider damages in light of this opinion.
One Takeaway from this Supreme Court Opinion: The detailed facts must be tethered to any lesson or principle of law taken from this opinion, but at least one ineluctable result of this ruling is that any attorney or businessperson who sends a term sheet to another party in the context of having a duty to negotiate in good faith, must read this opinion in order to determine whether liability will attach as a result of refusing to finalize a definitive agreement in a manner that may be construed, based on this opinion, to be based on less than good faith.
Brief Background
The prior decisions linked above provide more background, but a bare bones distillation of the factual setting involves SIGA and PharmAthene negotiating simultaneously for a license agreement and a merger agreement, with the goal that if the merger was not consummated that at least a license would result. After trial, the Court of Chancery found that the term sheet contained the essential terms for the license and that if a merger was not consummated, that a final and formal license agreement would be entered into. SeeSupreme Court Slip op. at 9.
Key fact: The parties signed a merger agreement which provided that if the merger were terminated, the parties agreed to negotiate in good faith a definitive license agreement based on the term sheet. (Notably, at the bottom of the two-page term sheet was a “footer” that stated: “non binding terms”. In the context of the other overwhelming facts, that footer was not determinative.)
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