Monthly Archives: March 2015

When Executives Fail: Managing Performance on the CEO’s Team

The following post comes to us from Mark Nadler, Principal and co-founder of Nadler Advisory Services, and is based on a Nadler white paper.

Picture, if you will, the chief executive officer of a Fortune 500 company slumped over a conference table, holding his head in his hands, anguishing over whether the time had come to pull the plug on one of his most senior executives. “Tell me,” he asks in despair, “is it this hard for everybody?”

Yes, it is.

Of all the complex, sensitive, and stressful issues that confront CEOs, none consumes as much time, generates as much angst, or extracts such a high personal toll as dealing with executive team members who are just not working out. Billion-dollar acquisitions, huge strategic shifts, even decisions to eliminate thousands of jobs—all pale in comparison with the anxiety most CEOs experience when it comes to deciding the fate of their direct reports.

To be sure, there are exceptions. Every once in a while, an executive fouls up so dramatically or is so woefully incompetent that the CEO’s course of action is clear. However, that’s rarely the case. More typically, these situations slowly escalate. Early warning signs are either dismissed or overlooked, and by the time the problem starts reaching crisis proportions, the CEO has become deeply invested in making things work. He or she procrastinates, grasping at one flawed excuse after another. Meanwhile, the cost of inaction mounts daily, exacted in poor leadership and lost opportunities.

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SEC Enforcement Developments in 2014, and a Look Forward

The following post comes to us from Bill McLucas, partner and chair of the securities department at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, and is based on a WilmerHale publication by Mr. McLucas; the complete publication, including footnotes, is available here.

As we noted last year in our memorandum focused on 2013 developments, Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White has called for the SEC to be more aggressive in its enforcement program. By all accounts, the Enforcement Division has responded to that call. The past year saw the SEC continue the trend, started under Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami in 2009, of transforming the SEC’s civil enforcement arm into an aggressive law enforcement agency modeled on a federal prosecutor’s office. This should not come as a surprise since both Andrew Ceresney, the current Director, and George Cannellos, Ceresney’s Co-Director for a brief period of time, like Khuzami, spent many years as federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. And the Commission itself is now led for the first time by a former federal prosecutor, Mary Jo White, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1993 to 2002. Given the events of the past decade involving the Madoff fraud and the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, we believe both the aggressive tone and positions the SEC has taken in recent years will continue.

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Agencies Release New Volcker Rule FAQ

The following post comes to us from Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, and is based on a Sullivan & Cromwell publication by Whitney A. Chatterjee, H. Rodgin Cohen, C. Andrew Gerlach, and Eric M. Diamond; the complete publication, including footnotes and appendix, is available here.

On February 27, 2015, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the “Federal Reserve”), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (collectively, the “Agencies”) provided an important addition to their existing list of Frequently Asked Questions (“FAQs”) addressing the implementation of section 13 of the Bank Holding Company Act of 1956, as amended (the “BHC Act”), commonly known as the “Volcker Rule.”

The Volcker Rule imposes broad prohibitions on proprietary trading and investing in and sponsoring private equity funds, hedge funds and certain other investment vehicles (“covered funds”) by “banking entities” and their affiliates. The Volcker Rule, as implemented by the final rule issued by the Agencies (the “Final Rule”), provides an exemption from the covered fund prohibitions for foreign banking entities’ acquisition or retention of an ownership interest in, or sponsorship of, a covered fund “solely outside of the United States” (the “SOTUS covered fund exemption”).

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The (Neglected) Value of Board Accountability in Corporate Governance

The following post comes to us from Marc Moore, Director of the Centre for Corporate and Commercial Law at University of Cambridge.

The term “accountability” is virtually ubiquitous within literature and debates on organizational governance, and especially within corporate governance. However, as a social phenomenon it is frequently misunderstood, particularly by corporate lawyers.

To a large extent, this is unsurprising. After all, it is to be expected that complex sociological issues posed by the historically peculiar scale and structure of public companies—such as decisional power, accountability and legitimacy—will be received somewhat uneasily within orthodox corporate law discourse. Indeed, with limited exceptions, Anglo-American corporate law scholarship today remains rooted in the traditional conceptual habitat of private law, with its characteristic focus on the discrete relational transaction. A latent but nonetheless significant consequence of this has been the definitional “fudging” by corporate lawyers of some inherently public-governmental phenomena that are relevant to corporate governance, in an attempt to render them consistent with the logic and language of private law. This is true nowhere more than with respect to the difficult concept of accountability.

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Delaware Court: Minority Stockholders Did Not Waive Appraisal Rights

Toby Myerson is a partner in the Corporate Department at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and co-head of the firm’s Global Mergers and Acquisitions Group. The following post is based on a Paul Weiss memorandum. Justin A. Shuler contributed to this post. This post is part of the Delaware law series, which is cosponsored by the Forum and Corporation Service Company; links to other posts in the series are available here.

In Halpin v. Riverstone National, Inc., a controlling stockholder caused the company to complete a merger, but did so without exercising drag-along rights that would have compelled the minority stockholders to vote in favor of the merger and thereby waive their statutory rights to judicial appraisal. After receiving notification of the merger, the minority stockholders filed an action for statutory appraisal of their shares, and in response the company sought an order requiring the minority stockholders to vote in favor of the merger so that the company could avail itself of the benefits of the drag-along rights. The Delaware Court of Chancery held that because the company failed to properly exercise its drag-along rights in advance of the merger, the minority stockholders were not required to vote in favor of the merger and thus could pursue their appraisal rights.

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Enhancing Prudential Standards in Financial Regulations

The following post comes to us from Franklin Allen, Professor of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania and Imperial College London; Itay Goldstein, Professor of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania; and Julapa Jagtiani and William Lang, both of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

The recent financial crisis has generated fundamental reforms in the financial regulatory system in the U.S. and internationally. In our paper, Enhancing Prudential Standards in Financial Regulations, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, we discuss academic research and expert opinions on this vital subject of financial stability and regulatory reforms.

Despite the extensive regulation and supervision of U.S. banking organizations, the U.S. and the world financial systems were shaken by the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression, largely precipitated by events within the U.S. financial system. The new “macroprudential” approach to financial regulations focuses on both the risks arising in financial markets broadly and those risks arising from financial distress at individual financial institutions.

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Key Points from 2015 Dodd-Frank Act Stress Test (DFAST)

The following post comes to us from Dan Ryan, Leader of the Financial Services Advisory Practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and is based on a PwC publication by Mike Alix and Steve Pearson.

For the first time all banks passed DFAST this year, but this unfortunately told us nothing about their chances of passing last week’s CCAR qualitative assessment.

The DFAST results published March 5, 2015 are the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) first stress test results released in 2015. On March 11th, the Fed released the more important Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) results which told us whether the banks passed the Fed’s qualitative and quantitative assessments in order to return more capital to shareholders. [1]

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Private Equity Fund Managers: Annual Compliance Reminders and New Developments

The following post comes to us from David J. Greene, partner focusing on investment fund formation, structuring, and related transactions at Latham & Watkins LLP, and is based on a Latham client alert by Mr. Greene, Amy Rigdon, Barton Clark, and Nabil Sabki.

US federal laws and regulations, as well as the rules of self-regulatory organizations, impose numerous yearly reporting and compliance obligations on private equity firms. While these obligations include many routine and ongoing obligations, new and emerging regulatory developments also impact private equity firms’ compliance operations. This post provides a round-up of certain annual or periodic investment advisory compliance-related requirements that apply to many private equity firms. In addition, this post highlights material regulatory developments in 2014 as well as a number of expectations regarding areas of regulatory focus for 2015.

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A Modest Strategy for Combatting Frivolous IPO Lawsuits

Boris Feldman is a member of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C. The views expressed in this post are those of Mr. Feldman and do not reflect those of his firm or clients.

With a minor change to the customary lock-up agreement, issuers and underwriters may be better able to fight frivolous IPO lawsuits. By allowing non-registration statement shares to enter the market, underwriters may prevent Section 11 strike-suiters from “tracing” their shares to the IPO. This could enable ’33 Act defendants to knock out the lawsuits against them.

Basics of Section 11 Standing and Tracing

Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933, 15 U.S. Code § 77k, provides a private remedy for those who purchase shares issued pursuant to a registration statement that is materially false or misleading. The remedy applies to “any person acquiring such security.” Section 11(a). That is, a person may assert a claim with respect to shares issued pursuant to the particular registration statement.

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Delaware (Again) Proposes Sledgehammering Fee-Shifting Bylaws

The following post comes to us from John L. Reed, chair of the Wilmington Litigation group and a partner in the Corporate and Litigation groups at DLA Piper LLP, and is based on a DLA Piper Corporate Governance Alert by Mr. Reed and Ed Batts. This post is part of the Delaware law series, which is cosponsored by the Forum and Corporation Service Company; links to other posts in the series are available here.

As part of the annual update cycle for Delaware’s General Corporations Law (DGCL), the Delaware Bar has returned to last year’s controversy on fee-shifting provisions in bylaws and certificates of incorporation to propose, yet again, destroying the ability of Delaware corporations to, in their organizing documents, have the losing party in an intra-company (i.e. fiduciary duty) lawsuit pay the prevailing party’s legal fees.

The proposal is among several 2015 legislative changes to the DGCL proposed by the Council of the Corporation Law Section of the Delaware State Bar Association, which is the working-level body that, historically through consensus, creates changes to the DGCL.

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