Shareholder Activists Risk Destroying Board Effectiveness

David A. Katz and Laura A. McIntosh of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz have released this Memorandum detailing several proxy-access and executive-compensation proposals voted on during this year’s proxy season.  The Memorandum offers a highly insightful analysis of the effects of shareholder activism on corporate governance, concluding that “the specific interventions that are the subject of recent stockholder proposals are becoming less justified as more companies move towards a majority-voting standard in the election of directors,” and thus that shareholder activists “would be wise . . . to let the current round of reforms play out rather than attempting to accelerate the pace of reform still further.”

The full Memorandum is available here.