Peter B Ladig

Practice Areas

Corporate & Commercial Litigation

Corporate & Alternative Entity Governance

Professional Memberships

American Bar Association

Delaware State Bar Association

Richard S. Rodney American Inn of Court

Court of Chancery Rules Committee

Career

Peter B. Ladig is a director and co-chair of the litigation group at Bayard. Pete is a seasoned litigator with over 25 years of experience litigating corporate and commercial disputes in Delaware courts. Pete has litigated corporate governance matters, commercial disputes, business divorces, breach of fiduciary duty actions, statutory claims under the Delaware General Corporation Law, partnership and limited liability company disputes, and class action and derivative cases.

In addition to Pete’s litigation experience, he has served on the Rules Committee of the Court of Chancery since 2011 and was one of the principal drafters of Rule 5.1, which prescribes procedures related to public access and confidentiality of documents filed with the Chancery Court. Pete also uses his litigation experience to advise special committees of boards of directors in analyzing conflict transactions or investigating alleged wrongdoing, and he has represented several of each type of committee.

Pete also has extensive experience in the growing area of the “business divorce,” particularly requests for judicial dissolution of limited liability companies and corporations. In addition to representing parties to a business divorce, Pete has served as a trustee of a dissolving entity and as counsel to a Chancery Court-appointed custodian charged with selling an operating company to resolve a business divorce. He co-chaired the Business Divorce Subcommittee of the Business and Corporation Litigation Committee of the Business Law Section of the ABA; has spoken on panels about business divorce; and has made substantial contributions to Litigating the Business Divorce, a publication from BNA.

Because of the breadth of Pete’s experience, he has served as a Special Master selected by the Court or at the request of the parties. Most recently, Pete the Court of Chancery appointed Pete to be the Discovery Facilitator in the In re Viacom Inc. Stockholders Litigation and In re CBS Corporation Stockholder Class Action and Derivative Litigation actions, assisting the parties in coordinating discovery between the two actions and mediating discovery disputes. Pete also acts as a mediator for corporate and commercial disputes. In 2022, Pete completed the Mediating Disputes class at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Education