With just 27 partners, it’s a minor miracle that the litigation group at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz even made it to the final round for Litigation Department of the Year. But with two of the competition’s most far-reaching achievements—preserving the right of companies to employ the poison pill defense to hostile takeovers, and dramatically raising the bar for extraterritorial claims in U.S. courts—Wachtell was an obvious choice.
Almost from the moment that Wachtell’s Martin Lipton invented the poison pill in the early 1980s, corporate lawyers have debated whether it has a limited shelf life, or whether the pill may be deployed in the later stages of a prolonged takeover battle. That question was answered once and for all during the 16-month bid by Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., for its rival maker of specialty gases, Airgas, Inc.
