On October 11, Silicon Valley Bank’s NYC Office is hosting a forum on the M&A exit.  Our partner Ethan Klingsberg, who regularly serves as counsel to serial acquirors, as well as companies in connection with major liquidity events, will be joined by CEO/CFOs from top private companies to lead the discussion. The invitation and RSVP link may be found here.

On September 18, 2018, The Conference Board and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP co-hosted a panel discussion on the key findings from the Conference Board’s Job of the Corporate Director Series. Participants in the panel discussion included Victor Lewkow and Jared Gerber, partners at Cleary Gottlieb, and John Wilcox, Chairman of Morrow Sodali.

Moderator Doug Chia, executive director of The Conference Board, and the panelists discussed a number of topics related to the job of the corporate director, including:

• the job description of the corporate director and lessons that directors can learn from company failures and crises;
• the boards’ risk oversight and recommended practices for directors;
• the board’s role in CEO succession planning;
• board composition, including how boards can ensure they have the right mix of perspectives through board diversity, board refreshment, board evaluations and use of directors with particular areas of expertise;
• expectations and best practices in director-shareholder engagement, in particular the role of directors in engagement with activist investors; and
• the board’s interaction with management, including the asymmetric information risk in relying on information prepared by management and legal concerns raised by activist-directors using their own staff to prepare analyses of the company.

A replay of the webcast is available here (please note that your browser may require you to run an Adobe plugin to access this content).

At the 2018 National Conference of the Society for Corporate Governance, partner Pamela L. Marcogliese moderated a panel on Disclosure Committees and the current market practice at public companies.

The panelists engaged in a discussion about the reasons for establishing a Disclosure Committee including centralizing and organizing disclosure responsibilities, helping to comply with disclosure obligations under the federal securities laws and supporting the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer certifications under Sarbanes-Oxley in providing oversight of the company’s disclosure controls and procedures. Continue Reading Cleary Partner Moderates Panel on Disclosure Committees

We were grateful that approximately 200 of you participated in Cleary Gottlieb’s fourth annual M&A, Antitrust and the Board Room conference at the Federal Reserve building in San Francisco, hosted and co-sponsored by our friends at Berkeley Law School, as well as sponsors Innisfree M&A and MacKenzie Partners.

The day featured:

• SEC Commissioner Robert Jackson’s delivery of his controversial “The Case Against Corporate Royalty” speech, a thought-provoking follow-up talk by Doug Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and a discussion with Michael Ronen, a leader of the Softbank Vision Fund; Lev Finkelstein, head of corporate finance at Dropbox; Wanji Walcott, general counsel of Paypal; Jean Rogers, chair of SASB; and Cleary partner Ethan Klingsberg.
• A vigorous debate about the role of innovation in antitrust merger review among Thomas Deisenhofer, EC Head of Merger Control; Richard Gilbert, former Deputy Assistant AG for Economics; Bruce Hoffman, Acting Director at the FTC’s Competition Bureau; and Cleary partners George Cary and Elaine Ewing.
• A candid dialogue between Vice Chancellor Tamika Montgomery-Reeves and Cleary partner Kim Spoerri about the nuances and future directions of Delaware fiduciary duty litigation.
• The latest from the front lines of proxy contests and activism defense from MacKenzie CEO Dan Burch and Innisfree Managing Director Scott Winter, as well as Anne Chapman, who recently joined Joele Frank after 20+ years of overseeing proxy voting at Capital Research; Yumi Narita of BlackRock; Zach Oleksiuk, who recently joined Evercore after leading BlackRock’s corporate governance work; and Cleary partner Glenn McGrory.

Photos, a detailed recap of the day’s discussions, the agenda, and a list of participants can be found here.

Please do not hesitate to contact any of your friends at Cleary Gottlieb to follow up on any of the matters raised at the conference.

Our 4th annual “M&A, Antitrust and the Board Room: Challenges and Conundrums for the West Coast” conference will occur in San Francisco on February 15. For a listing of confirmed topics, participants and speakers, click here.  If you are interested in attending or would like additional information, contact RSVP@cgsh.com.