Delaware’s Judge Laster Is Making His Mark on Corporate America

Opposing attorneys in Delaware’s Court of Chancery typically refer to each other as “my friend at the other table” during oral arguments.

So J. Travis Laster, who spent years litigating in that mild-mannered world, caused a stir when, in one of his first orders after joining the court as a judge, he kicked several attorneys off a case.

That was in 2010, when he removed three law firms as lead counsel from a shareholder lawsuit because, he said, they hadn’t adequately pursued the case for corporate misdeeds before proposing a settlement. More than a dozen years later, Laster—now in the ...