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Program on Corporate Governance Advisory Board
- Peter Atkins
- David Bell
- Kerry E. Berchem
- Richard Brand
- Daniel Burch
- Paul Choi
- Jesse Cohn
- Arthur B. Crozier Christine Davine
- Renata J. Ferrari
- Andrew Freedman
- Ray Garcia
- Byron Georgiou
- Joseph Hall
- Jason M. Halper William P. Mills
- David Millstone
- Theodore Mirvis
- Philip Richter
- Elina Tetelbaum
- Sebastian Tiller
- Marc Trevino Jonathan Watkins
- Steven J. Williams
HLS Faculty & Senior Fellows
Author Archives: Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation
A Modest Strategy for Combatting Frivolous IPO Lawsuits
Editor’s Note: 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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Click here to read the complete postDelaware (Again) Proposes Sledgehammering Fee-Shifting Bylaws
Editor’s Note: 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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Posted in Legislative & Regulatory Developments, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Attorneys' fees, Charter & bylaws, Delaware law, Delaware legislation, DGCL, Shareholder suits
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Incentive Alignment through Performance-Focused Shareholder Proposals on Management Compensation
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Steve Fortin of the Accounting Area at McGill University; Chandra Subramaniam of the Department of Accounting at the University of Texas at Arlington; Xu (Frank) Wang of the Department of Accounting at Saint Louis University; and Sanjian Bill Zhang of the Department of Accountancy at California State University, Long Beach. Work from the Program on Corporate Governance about CEO pay includes: The CEO Pay Slice by Lucian Bebchuk, Martijn Cremers, and Urs Peyer (discussed on the Forum here); Paying for Long-Term Performance by Lucian Bebchuk and Jesse Fried (discussed on the Forum here); and Lucky CEOs and Lucky Directors by Lucian Bebchuk, Yaniv Grinstein and Urs Peyer (discussed on the Forum here).
Corporate boards are conscious of the role that executive pay practices play in improving corporate governance and increasing shareholder wealth (Gammeltoft, 2010). Economic theory suggests that the key to aligning managerial compensation with shareholder interest is to increase the sensitivity of executive compensation to firm performance (Core et al., 2005; Jensen and Meckling, 1976). Firms finance their operations, however, with funds from both shareholders and creditors, e.g., bondholders. Thus, agency theory also concerns shareholder-bondholder agency conflict and the difficulty of concurrently aligning the interests of shareholders, bondholders, and managers (Ahmed et al., 2002; Jensen and Meckling, 1976; Ortiz-Molina, 2007). In the past decade, the business press has focused on excessive CEO pay, observed during the 2001 Enron/Worldcom scandals as well as the recent 2007–2008 credit crisis, e.g., AIG. Critics contend that contracting between CEOs and boards has been shadowed by pervasive managerial influence (Bebchuk and Fried, 2005; Crystal, 1992). Consistent with these concerns, shareholders have begun to use the “shareholder proposal rule” (Rule 14a-8) established by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to defend their interest and have submitted hundreds of proposals to many of the largest U.S. corporations.
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Posted in Academic Research, Executive Compensation
Tagged Bondholders, Executive Compensation, Incentives, Management, Pay for performance, Rule 14a-8, Say on pay, Shareholder proposals, Stock performance
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Vice Chancellor Laster and the Long-Term Rule
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Covington & Burling LLP and is based on a Covington article by Jack Bodner, Leonard Chazen, and Donald Ross. 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.
Vice Chancellor Laster has been writing for several years about the fiduciary duties of directors who represent the interests of a particular block of stockholders. In his opinion in the Trados Shareholder Litigation he found that directors, elected by the venture capital investors who held Trados’s preferred stock, had a conflict of interest in deciding on a sale of the corporation in which all the proceeds would be absorbed by the liquidation preference of the preferred and nothing would go to the common. [1] As a result of this finding, Vice Chancellor Laster applied the entire fairness standard of review to the Trados board’s decision. He concluded that while the directors failed to follow a fair process, the transaction was fair because the common stock had no economic value before the sale and so it was fair for the common stock to receive nothing from the sale. [2] In a recent Business Lawyer article which he co-authored with Delaware practitioner John Mark Zeberkiewicz, [3] Vice Chancellor Laster extended his Trados conflict of interest analysis to other situations in which directors represent stockholder constituencies with short-term investment horizons, including directors elected by activist stockholders seeking immediate steps to increase the near term stock price of the corporation. He states that such directors can face a conflict of interest between their duties to the corporation and their duties to the activists.
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Posted in Boards of Directors, Mergers & Acquisitions, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Boards of Directors, Conflicts of interest, Controlling shareholders, Delaware cases, Delaware law, Fiduciary duties, Merger litigation, Shareholder suits, Short-termism
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Disentangling Mutual Fund Governance from Corporate Governance
Editor’s Note: The following post comes to us from Eric D. Roiter of Boston University School of Law.
Disentangling Mutual Fund Governance from Corporate Governance addresses mutual fund governance, explaining how in recent years it has become entangled with the norms and rules of corporate governance. At one level, it is understandable that mutual funds have been seen simply as a type of ordinary corporation, leading the SEC and the courts to treat mutual fund governance as simply a variation on the theme of corporate governance. Both mutual funds and corporations are separate legal entities, having directors and shareholders. Directors of each are held to fiduciary duties, charged with serving shareholders’ interests, and aspire to best practices. But there are fundamental differences between mutual funds and ordinary corporations, and this article contends that these differences have important implications for the governance of mutual funds, differences that should lead not to further entanglement of fund governance with corporate governance but to disentanglement.
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Posted in Academic Research, Institutional Investors, Securities Regulation
Tagged Corporate governance, Fiduciary duties, Institutional Investors, Investment Company Act, Mutual funds, SEC, SEC rulemaking, Securities regulation
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Delaware Poised to Embrace Appraisal Arbitrage
Editor’s Note: Trevor Norwitz is a partner in the Corporate Department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School. 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.
Delaware corporations and their advisers have been eagerly awaiting the response of the Delaware legislature to the recent surge in appraisal arbitrage and judicial pronouncements allowing this activity and suggesting that lawmakers should step in if they perceive a problem. It now appears based on a proposal released by the Delaware Corporation Law Council that the legislature may act as soon as this week. If the lawmakers follow the recommendations of the Council (which they usually do) the changes will likely disappoint Delaware corporations, make mergers and acquisitions in that important state more difficult, reduce deal flow, and lead to lower prices being paid to selling shareholders. The beneficiaries of this legislation will be the small (but growing) group of short term speculators specializing in appraisal arbitrage and the advisors who support that industry. Some of the problems created by appraisal arbitrage are described in my post on this subject a few weeks ago.
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Posted in Mergers & Acquisitions, Practitioner Publications
Tagged Appraisal rights, Arbitrage, Delaware law, Merger litigation, Mergers & acquisitions
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Shareholder Litigation Involving Acquisitions of Public Companies
Editor’s Note: John Gould is senior vice president at Cornerstone Research. This post discusses a Cornerstone Research report by Olga Koumrian, titled “Shareholder Litigation Involving Acquisitions of Public Companies,” which is available in full here.
A new report shows that the percentage of 2014 lawsuits filed by shareholders in M&A deals remained consistent with the previous four years, while other key indicators suggest a slowdown. The report, Shareholder Litigation Involving Acquisitions of Public Companies, released February 25, 2015 by Cornerstone Research, reveals that investors contested 93 percent of M&A transactions in 2014. Despite this typically high percentage, shareholders brought a smaller number of competing lawsuits per deal and in fewer jurisdictions, challenged fewer deals valued below $1 billion, and took slightly longer to file lawsuits.
In a significant shift from recent years, 60 percent of contested M&A deals had lawsuits filed against them in only one jurisdiction. Just 4 percent of these deals were challenged in more than two courts, the lowest number since 2007.
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Posted in Mergers & Acquisitions, Practitioner Publications, Securities Litigation & Enforcement
Tagged Merger litigation, Mergers & acquisitions, Securities litigation, Settlements, Shareholder suits, Surveys
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German Stock Market Development, 1870-1938
Editor’s Note: Brian Cheffins is Professor of Corporate Law at the University of Cambridge. The following post is based on an article co-authored by Professor Cheffins, David Chambers of Cambridge Judge Business School, and Carsten Burhop of Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
Since World War II, Germany’s stock market has been mostly an after-thought, despite a highly successful economy. Why might this be the case? Explanations have included the power and influence of banks, the stakeholder-oriented nature of Germany’s economy and Germany’s civil law heritage. In Law, Politics and the Rise and Fall of German Stock Market Development, 1870-1938 we argue, based on statistical analysis of a hand-collected dataset of initial public offerings (IPOs), that a combination of law and politics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries played a significant role in the evolution of German equity markets. For most of this period Germany had, contrary to the present-day pattern, a stock market that was sizeable in comparative terms. The law helped to foster this trend but legal reforms during the Nazi era reversed matters in a way that had lasting consequences.
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Posted in Academic Research, Empirical Research
Tagged Capital markets, Europe, Germany, Investor protection, IPOs
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California Court Clarifies Scope of Class Action Judgment Reduction Provision
Editor’s Note: Brad Karp is chairman and partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. This post is based on a Paul Weiss client memorandum.
In Rieckborn v. Velti plc, 2015 WL 468329 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 3, 2015) (Orrick, J.), the United States District Court for the Northern District of California clarified the scope of the judgment reduction provision that is found in almost all class action settlement agreements by holding that nonsettling defendants are entitled to a judgment reduction measured by the proportion of fault of all settling defendants, not just a dollar-for-dollar judgment reduction, on all settled claims under the Securities Act of 1933 (the “Securities Act”). In so holding, the court handed a major victory to nonsettling defendants in actions under the Securities Act by granting them a favorable form of judgment reduction on claims not explicitly covered by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (the “PSLRA”). The court’s opinion also makes clear that bar orders cannot preclude “independent claims” and that bar orders must be “mutual,” thereby giving guidance to the drafters of class action settlement agreements.
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Posted in Court Cases, Practitioner Publications, Securities Litigation & Enforcement
Tagged California, Class actions, PSLRA, Securities Act, Securities litigation, Settlements
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