Boards of Directors

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In recent years, shareholder plaintiffs have brought a series of claims before the Delaware Court of Chancery alleging that directors of Delaware companies have abused their discretion in granting themselves excessive equity compensation for their board service.  These cases raised the threshold question of whether the plaintiffs’ challenges should be reviewed under the “entire fairness” standard, which requires the company to bear the burden of proving that the director awards were fair, or the more deferential “business judgment” standard, which grants considerable discretion to directors’ decisions, often resulting in dismissal of claims that fail to plead particularized facts indicating fiduciary lapses by the directors.
Continue Reading New Year’s Resolutions For Director Compensation From Investors Bancorp

2017 began with a heightened level of uncertainty as the beginning of the year brought significant change in the legal environment, including a change in administration that promised to significantly alter the tenor of regulation. While certain changes did occur in 2017, in many respects, 2018 is setting itself up as the year to watch…

On December 5, 2017, the Financial Reporting Council launched a consultation on its proposal to significantly revise the UK Corporate Governance Code.

The amendments seek to encourage continued improvement in the quality of corporate governance in the UK and are centered around the themes of company culture and diversity, employee and other stakeholder representation, responding…

Over the past couple of years, we have seen traditional, actively managed funds, such as Neuberger Berman, borrow activist tactics and push for changes to accelerate increases in share prices.  In parallel with this arguable trend toward convergence between actively managed funds and activist funds, a chasm appeared to be developing elsewhere in the investor landscape as pension and passive strategy funds increasingly focused on “social good” issues, while brand name activist funds remained primarily focused on nearer term financial performance and returns.  But the activists desperately need the support of the pension and passive strategy funds, as evidenced by the proxy contests over the past year where support from these funds was neither predictable nor easily locked up.  The announcement on January 6, 2018 by JANA Partners, a high profile activist fund, and CalSTRs, an outspoken pension fund, that they have teamed up to accumulate a $2 billion equity position in Apple for the purpose of launching a specific “social good” campaign is the strongest indication to date that the magnitude of assets under management focused on social good matters cannot be ignored and that even a successful activist fund like JANA needs to burnish its reputation in this area. 
Continue Reading The Schizophrenic Investor Landscape: The Significance for Boards and Managements of the JANA/CalSTRs Letter to Apple

On 29 August 2017, the UK Government published its response to its recent consultation on UK corporate governance reform. The Government has proposed 12 reforms to the UK corporate governance regime, centered around executive remuneration, employee and other stakeholder representation and corporate governance in large privately-held businesses. In this memorandum, we briefly explore each of…

  • The Impact of New Trends in Asset Management and Investor Expectations
  • The Relationship between the CEO and an Activist Director

The keynote presentation at the 2017 Tulane Corporate Law Institute featured a discussion among

  • Gerald Hassell, Chair and CEO of Bank of New York Mellon;
  • Ed Garden, CIO and Founding Partner of Trian Partners; and

…

As passive investing via funds that track market indices continues to grow, the terrain where investors are fighting battles over governance reform is now expanding beyond contested stockholder meetings and into debates over the criteria for eligibility of issuers for inclusion in these indices.  Indeed, in this era of index fund investing, a company focused on the future trading price of its shares should be much more concerned about gaining entry into and maintaining eligibility for indices than whether there will be a withhold vote recommendation on the members of its governance committee.  If this direction continues to gain traction, we could end up with a market dominated by passive strategy investing where the current importance of familiarity with the hot button governance concerns of proxy advisory firms and institutional investors becomes subsidiary to understanding how to navigate new, governance-related eligibility requirements of major equity indices.
Continue Reading Index Eligibility as Governance Battlefield: Why the System is Not Broken and We Can Live With Dual Class Issuers

Questions for Boards and Management

On April 10, 2017 Wells Fargo released the independent directors’ report on sales practices at its community bank. While the report covers familiar elements of the widely-publicized accounts-creation  problems at the bank, it also takes an inside look at the organization to determine what caused the problems in the first place and what allowed them to persist for years before last fall’s regulatory enforcement actions.  The report cites the following as principal causes:
Continue Reading With the Benefit of Hindsight: The Wells Fargo Sales Practices Investigation Report

When reviewing a corporation’s financial statements and internal controls, independent auditors frequently request copies of materials that were prepared for ongoing or anticipated litigation.  Auditors may wish to examine reports from internal investigations, legal opinions addressing potential liabilities, or presentations about prospective litigation prepared for the board of directors, among other materials.  Indeed, it is becoming more and more common for auditors to conduct their own “shadow investigation” of a company’s internal investigation and, as part of that shadow investigation, to request access to the internal investigation’s underlying work product:  the collection of documents that the company’s lawyers have deemed “key,” the analysis of transactions tested by forensic accountants working at counsel’s direction, and notes from interviews conducted by counsel in the course of the investigation.  Auditors may make similar requests when investigating the possibility of “illegal acts” at a company, as required under Section 10A of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.
Continue Reading Audits and Adversaries: Making Disclosures to Your Auditors Without Waiving Your Privilege