Kaplan v. Peat, Marwick, Mitchell & Co.’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
3 federal appellate · 3 district · 26 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 44 later decisions — most recently March 2025 · most notably Levine v. Smith (1991), Grimes v. Donald (1996)
3 federal appellate · 3 district · 26 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Hawes v. Oakland · Aronson v. Lewis · Daily Income Fund, Inc. v. Fox · Guth v. Loft, Inc. · Zapata Corp. v. Maldonado
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 44 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“[P]re-suit demand under Chancery Court Rule 23.1 is an objective burden which must be met in order for the shareholder to have capacity to sue on behalf of the corporation. The right to bring a derivative action does not come into existence until the plaintiff shareholder has made a demand on the corporation to institute such an action or until the shareholder has demonstrated that demand would be futile.”
5 later decisions quote this exact passage“First, it is the equivalent of a suit by the shareholders to compel the corporation to sue. Second, it is a suit by the corporation, asserted by the shareholders on its behalf, against those liable to it.”
3 later decisions quote this exact passage“By its very nature the derivative action impinges on the managerial freedom of directors. Hence, the demand requirement ... exists at the threshold, first to insure that a stockholder exhausts his in-tercorporate remedies, and then to provide a safeguard against strike suits. Thus, by promoting this form of alternate dispute resolution, rather than immediate recourse to litigation, the demand requirement is a recognition of the fundamental precept that directors manage the business and affairs of corporations.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.