In our article Fair Markets and Fair Disclosure: Some Thoughts on The Law and Economics of Blockholder Disclosure, and the Use and Abuse of Shareholder Power forthcoming in Harvard Business Law Review, Spring 2012, and available at SSRN, we discuss the debate that has ensued following the March 2011 petition by our law firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, to the Securities and Exchange Commission to modernize the blockholder reporting rules under Section 13(d) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The petition sought to ensure that the reporting rules would continue to operate in a way broadly consistent with the statute’s clear purposes that an investor must promptly notify the market when it accumulates a block of publicly traded stock representing more than 5% of an issuer’s outstanding shares, and that loopholes that have arisen by changing market conditions and practices since the statute’s adoption over forty years ago could not continue to be exploited by stockholder activists, to the detriment of market transparency and fairness to all security holders. Among other things, the petition proposed that the time to publicly disclose such block acquisitions be reduced from ten days to one business day, given activists’ current ability to take advantage of the ten-day window to accumulate positions well above 5% prior to any public disclosure, in contravention of the clear purposes of the statute.

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