September 2014

Like many people I know, I am a huge fan of Frank Pasquale.  Thus, I was very excited to read his Balkanization interview (available here) discussing his forthcoming book, “The Black Box Society.”  The interview touches on a wide range of topics, so you should go read the whole thing, but here is an excerpt to tempt you in case you’re on the fence:

I think our academic culture is very good at analysis, but oft-adrift when it comes to synthesis. Specialization obscures the big picture. And law can succumb to this as easily [as] any other field. For example, in the case of internet companies, cyberlawyers too often confine themselves to saying: “Google and Facebook should win key copyright cases, and subsequent trademark cases, and antitrust cases, and get certain First Amendment immunities, and not be classified as a ‘consumer reporting agency’ under relevant privacy laws,” etc. They may well be correct in every particular case. But what happens when a critical mass of close cases combines with network effects to give a few firms incredible power over our information about (and even interpretation of) events?

Similarly, old banking laws may fit poorly with

…

But that’s what happened when hedge fund Starboard Value delivered a 294-slide presentation on the terrible food at Olive Garden as part of its fight for control of Darden Restaurants. (You can see the presentation in all of its glory here.)

The presentation not only received news coverage in standard outlets like WSJ and Bloomberg, but even attracted the attention of Slate and Mother Jones, who were amused by such detailed accusations as “Darden stopped salting the water in which it boils pasta,” that the crispy Parmesan asparagus is “anything but,” and Starboard’s lament that Olive Garden wait staff bring multiple breadsticks to the table at once, instead of delivering one per customer with a right of replenishment – which leads, according to Starboard, to cold breadsticks that “deteriorate in quality,” and encourages customers to fill up on the free stuff instead of ordering more things that cost money.

Starboard also complained that the Olive Garden menu has expanded to non-Italian offerings like tapas and burgers, that Olive Garden overstuffs its salads and lards them with too much dressing, and that the wait staff fail to push alcohol sales.

All of this, of course, led to such…

I am passing on the English translation of a call for book chapters issued by a friend and colleague in Dijon, France.  The book is international and has a broad business management focus.

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As the editor of a forthcoming book, it is my greatest pleasure to invite you to submit articles as chapters. The tentative title is: Strategic Managerial Approaches to Crowdfunding Online. The book will be published by IGI Global publishers in the USA, within the series “Advances in Business Strategy and Competitive Advantage (ABSCA).”

Please read carefully the following guidelines for submission:

The context

The emerging crowdfunding phenomenon is a collective effort by individuals who network and pool their money together, usually via the internet and without any specific conventional financial intermediation, in order to invest in and support for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures initiative undertaken by other people or organizations. The spontaneous interactions and transactions between individuals allow relatively considerable fund raisings by drawing on small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the Internet, without standard financial intermediaries.

The advent of crowdfunding coincides with the democratization of information technologies that enable people to contact, interact, collaborate and exchange at lowest costs, if not for free. In fact, information technologies have allowed the drastic reduction of transaction costs and by the same the revival of ancient forms of transactions such as auctions, barter, tenders, recycling, and direct transactions between individuals.

Many platforms encourage crowdfunding such as Kiva, Babyloan, MyC4 in lending to the poor entrepreneurs, Prosper, Kapipal and Zopa in P2P social lending, Kickstarter, MyMajorCompany in entrepreneurial projects, SellaBand in music, etc.

Call for Papers

ITEM 6 – Tunis, Tunisia

Microfinance: Coaching, Counting, and Crowding

The Banque Populaire Chair in Microfinance of the Burgundy School of Business (France) and l’École supérieure du commerce de Tunis jointly organize the 6th edition of the annual conference “Institutional and Technological Environment of Microfinance” (ITEM) in March 2015 (17, 18, 19) in Tunis, Tunisia.

The 6th edition brings together–but not limited to-three major issues, which are shaping the sector of microfinance: Coaching, Counting, and Crowding.

Coaching in microfinance provides training in business and soft skills (attributes enhancing an individual’s interactions and self-performance) that the poor micro-entrepreneurs rarely have. Increasingly, microfinance academics and practitioners consider building the human capital of micro-entrepreneurs a critical ingredient of moving out of poverty.

Counting and tracking the microfinance clients and prospects with the information technologies not only lessen information asymmetry, but also lower the transaction cost of financial intermediation. Corollary: information technologies can open ways for offering financial services to the poor as a normal way of doing and extending normal business, and accelerate their social integration. 

Crowding, based on the Web 2.0 technologies, enables direct interactions between millions of lending and borrowing people. Through crowdfunding, micro and…

We are less than a month away from the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference (a/k/a the “meat market” or the “FRC”). Reading the comments at PrawfsBlawg from the nervous candidates brings me back to my time on the meat market in 2010.

In this post, I hope to encourage hiring committees to engage in some perspective taking and improve the typical law school hiring process for candidates.

Instead of focusing on schools that I felt needed improvement in their hiring processes, I want to highlight one hiring committee that I think got it exactly right. The hiring committee was from The University of Oklahoma College of Law, made up of Emily Hammond (now at George Washington), Katheleen Guzman, and Joseph Thai.

Four years later, I remember their names vividly. I only made it to the FRC interview level with Oklahoma, and never got a call-back with the school, which makes their conduct that much more admirable. Oklahoma’s hiring committee excelled in three areas that I think all hiring committees should focus on and that I discuss more fully after the break: communication, transparency, and humanity.

Teaching the definition of a “security” to business associations students who: 1) want to be litigators; 2) are afraid of math, finance, and accounting; 3) don’t know anything about business; 4) only take the class because it’s required; and 5) aren’t allowed to distract themselves with electronics in class is no small feat.

Thankfully, as we were discussing the definition and exemptions, we also touched on IPOs. Many of the students knew nothing about IPOs but were already Alibaba customers and going through some of the registration statement made them understand the many reasons companies want to avoid going public. Of course, now that we went through some of the risk factors, my students who seemed gung ho about the IPO after watching some videos about the hype were a little less excited about it (good thing because they probably couldn’t buy anyway).  

Now if I can only figure out how to jazz up the corporate finance chapter next week.

Practitioners and academics alike should be interested in yesterday’s announcement by that the SEC that it is bringing an insider trading enforcement action against a law firm IT employee for allegedly trading based on the firm’s merger work for clients.  The employee allegedly made over $300,000 in a several year scheme of trading based upon client information.  The U.S. Attorney’s Office filed related criminal charges against the employee.

Donna Nagy at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, in her article, Insider Trading and the Gradual Demise of Fiduciary Principles, explains the theory of liability which extends the insider trading scope to law firm employees:

Under the alternative “misappropriation” theory endorsed by the Court in United States v. O’Hagan, persons “outside” the issuing corporation can likewise violate Section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5.  Such a violation occurs when a fiduciary personally profits from a securities transaction through undisclosed use of a principal’s material nonpublic information. Thus, as the Court explained, whereas the classical theory “premis[es] liability on a fiduciary relationship between company insider and purchaser or seller of the company’s stock, the misappropriation theory premises liability on a fiduciary-turned-trader’s deception of those who entrusted him with access to confidential information.”

The SEC, in its release cautioned that “Insider trading by employees of…

After my long trip away from my wonderful family in western North Dakota, I stopped in Chicago for the ABA Site Evaluation Workshop on my way home.  I’m not quite where my co-blogger is on the whole accreditation thing, but it was not my favorite thing to add another day away from my family. On the plus side, I got to see my brother and his family the night before it, and I appreciated my time with my colleagues from WVU and beyond, so it was okay.  

It was hard to be away, but it sure was a great to get home. I even got to come home to this after a long five days: 

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On so many levels, I am very, very fortunate.