March 10, 2008 The Current MAC Environment

I’ve written at inordinate length about how MAC provisions are used in contracts and how MAC is defined. But I don’t much get into whether, and how, MAC provisions are actually invoked in deals, unless issues of contract language come into play. For a useful discussion of such policy issues, see this DealBook story by […]

November 11, 2007 “Material Breach”

In my tireless quest to master all things related to materiality, I recently asked myself what the heck material breach means. I suspect that if you were to ask that question to a random sample of lawyers and business people, you’d mostly get a lot of hemming and hawing.
By extrapolating from my analyses of material […]

October 9, 2007 MAC in the News Again

One of the consequences of my having written articles on “material adverse change” provisions is that I get calls from reporters asking for insightful observations about any MAC dispute that makes the news. This time, it’s the lawsuit filed by Sallie Mae against a buyout group led by J.C. Flowers. Click here to see the […]

September 17, 2007 Another Article on What “Material” Means

The Sept.–Oct. 2007 issue of “Deal Lawyers” contains my article “What does ‘Material’ Mean.” Click here for a copy of the entire issue.
This article represents a boiled-down version of my recent New York Law Journal article on the subject. But thanks to valuable input from two readers of this blog, I’ve made some useful changes: […]

September 4, 2007 Including “Circumstance” in the Definition of MAC

A reader in Italy asked me about a short article that he had seen on www.breakingviews.com. I wasn’t familiar with this site, but it describes itself as “the leading international source of online financial commentary.” (Click here to go to the article; you’ll need to subscribe, or at least register for a free trial.)
The article […]