Research Example: Fast Legal Research in midpage.ai

Here's a mock research assignment showcasing how midpage can help you cover a ton of ground in a few minutes.

The scenario: Your client is a large shareholder in a corporation that has announced its plans to issue additional stock to the existing board members. Your client believes this issuance is designed to entrench the current board members and wants to file a preliminary injunction in Florida state court to enjoin the issuance, where the company is headquartered and incorporated.

The problem is that you don’t know much about this area of law…let alone what the case law says in Florida.

Here’s what doing the research on midpage would feel like.

As always, it starts with a search.

The first search result is Picture Play Theaters. Although the case contains many matching keywords, the AI-generated description already makes it clear that it isn’t entirely on point. It involves a shareholder who sues to invalidate a board’s resolution canceling his fraudulently obtained stock.

To drill down on more on-point cases, we can add an AI filter to our search results to filter cases involving allegations of issuing stock to entrench the board of directors.

Selecting cases where the answer is “Yes” yields 9 results. Wolfson seems promising, so we open it.

What’s interesting is that this case doesn’t actually use the term “entrenchment.” Instead, the issuance was allegedly intended to dilute the plaintiff’s shares, which is still on point. This is one of the benefits of using AI filters: we could have easily missed this case otherwise.

Within a few seconds of opening the case, and after a few exchanges with the AI in the chat, it becomes clear that the key issue in this case was that the newly issued stock exceeded the number of authorized shares. The issuance itself was an ultra vires act, and the stock was void.

Maybe we can argue that there was no quorum at the meeting where the board passed the resolution issuing the new stock, rendering the action ultra vires, and the stock void. Let’s expand the search to Delaware to see if there’s a case along these lines.

The first case seems directly on point. When we open it up, we see that this was actually the winning argument.

And this case resulted in a grant of a preliminary injunction—exactly what we want.

After about 20 minutes, we have developed the beginnings of what may be a winning argument. Time to dig in further.