Formed in 2005 as Abrams & Laster,
Wilmington boutique Abrams & Bayliss has staked a firm claim in the
community, placing itself on equal footing with the more historically established shops. In fact, some actually consider the firm to be in an advantageous position to overtake those firms. “There is a generation of lawyers in Delaware that are 20 years senior to those at Abrams & Bayliss that for the past 20 years have dominated Delaware. Well, those people are ready to retire! That puts a firm like Abrams & Bayliss, who has a consistently strong bench of people in their 40s and 50s, ready to take over from those other firms who had one major star and no one else because they didn’t groom the younger partners.” The firm is also said to be “very selective with its associates.” A peer offers in summation, “Abrams & Bayliss is terrific, incredibly plugged into the Delaware space. They don’t do as much in the federal space but in Delaware they are second to none.”
Thompson Bayliss has emerged as the firm’s “leading light” in recent years, enjoying a well-earned ascent in profile due to his raft of commercial Chancery litigation in both the plaintiff and defense capacities.
“He just got a $600-something million verdict from Chancellor Laster [a firm founder and former partner, now on the Delaware Court of Chancery.] It’s in this weird niche MLP [master limited partnership] space. It’s on appeal, of course, but if it sticks,
Tom could just retire!” This verdict, with an actual amount of $690 million, was secured in November 2021 for former
investors of
Boardwalk Pipeline Partners who claimed they were short-changed in a July 2018 buyout. Loews, which controlled Boardwalk's general partner, was found to have breached Boardwalk’s partnership agreement in exercising its right to buy out the limited partners, and the Chancery Court found that the buyout did indeed undervalue the limited partners’ stake by 31%, and that they deserved $17.60 per unit instead of the $12.06 they were awarded. The case is currently on appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court, but Bayliss’s
remarkable
triumph for the
plaintiff investors – achieved in a solo capacity and not acting as simply Delaware counsel for a larger firm – catapults Bayliss into his debut position in the coveted
Top 100 Trial Lawyers list in this edition of Benchmark. Beyond Bayliss,
Michael Barlow
is said to be increasingly developing a name for himself. “He has such a strong relationship with firms like Quinn Emanuel,” notes a peer, “and they are calling on his services more and more.”
