Guest post by Jeffrey Lipshaw:
I’m honored to be asked to participate in this micro-symposium, and will (sort of) address the first two questions as I have restated them here.
- Does contract play a greater role in “uncorporate” structures than in otherwise comparable corporations and, more importantly, do I care?
Yes, as I’ll get to in #2, but indeed I probably don’t care. My friend and casebook co-author, the late great Larry Ribstein, was more than a scholar-analyst of the non- or “un-” corporate form; he was an enthusiastic advocate. It’s pretty clear that had to do with his faith in the long-term rationality of markets and their constituent actors and a concomitant distrust of regulatory intervention. Indeed, he argued the uncorporate form, based in contract, was more amenable than the regulatory-based corporate form to the creation of that most decidedly immeasurable quality, trust, and therefore the reduction of transaction costs. I confess I never quite understood the argument and tried to explain why, but only after Larry passed away, so I never got an answer.
Unlike Larry (and a number of my fellow AALS Agency, Partnership, & LLC section members), I was never able to generate a lot of normative fervor about the ultimate superiority of the non-corporate form. I view all organizational and transactional structures, including corporations, LLCs, and contracts, as models or maps. The contractual, corporate, and uncorporate models are always reductions in the bits and bytes of information from the complex reality, and that’s what makes them useful, just as a map of Cambridge, Massachusetts that was as complex as the real Cambridge would be useless.
The difference between city maps and word maps is that the latter are artifacts we lawyers create to chart or control a reality that, in all its damnable uncooperativeness, insists upon moving forward through time and not necessarily respecting all that hard work we did trying to map its possible twists and turns. City maps may also become obsolete over time, but streets and buildings tend not to evolve and adapt quite as quickly or fluidly as human desires and relationships. So we have fewer issues with the gaps between physical maps and physical reality (notwithstanding the desire of my car’s GPS to sell me annual updates) than with the gaps between what we want now and what we wrote down some time ago (whether by way of bylaws, operating agreement, or supply contract) to see that we got it.
Hence, if uncorporations differ from corporations, it’s more a matter of degree than of any real difference. Both are textual artifacts. We have created or assumed obligations pursuant to the text at certain points in time, and we use the artifacts and their associated legal baggage opportunistically when we can. I am not convinced that organizing in the form or corporations or uncorporations makes much difference on that score.
- Is the unfettered ordering in LLCs and limited partnerships – like being able to eliminate wholly all fiduciary duties among the members or partners, as Delaware permits – a good thing? Or should there be some standardized (and I presume therefore mandatory) fiduciary obligations for uncorporations, as Chief Justice Strine and Vice-Chancellor Laster suggest?
Having now gotten my general curmudgeonly-ness out of the way about the whole subject, and believing that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, I want to point out an area where the corporate model and its baggage indeed don’t match up to what normal human beings would expect as reasonable. I confess it’s something that has been a bug up my backside for a number of years, in that I personally had to counsel on the dilemma, and would have loved it if we had organized this particular company as a Delaware limited partnership with only limited and specified fiduciary obligations.
Here’s the circumstance. ABC Corporation spins off one of its businesses into a majority-owned subsidiary, DEF Corporation, possibly as the first step in a complete divestiture. (There’s possibly a tax benefit doing it this way, but let’s not go there right now.) DEF is now publicly traded, with a substantial minority, but ABC controls it both as to ownership (a majority share percentage) and management (posit that ABC appoints a majority of the board of the subsidiary). Assume that DEF’s common stock is now trading at, say, $15 per share on the NASDAQ. A third party, XYZ Corporation, contacts ABC’s CEO, and says the following: “We are prepared to pay $32 per share for all of DEF, both yours and the public minority, but we view this as pre-emptive, and if you shop the bid, we will walk away.” ABC’s CEO’s visceral reaction is to tell XYZ that if it will send over the check, she will deliver the share certificate this afternoon. Indeed, were DEF still wholly owned, that’s probably what would happen soon, if not that afternoon.
But Delaware corporate law doesn’t like that at all when there’s a public minority. See McMullin v. Beran, 765 A.2d 910 (Del. 2000) and Lyondell Chemical Co. v. Ryan, 970 A.2d 235 (Del. 2009). DEF’s board is going to have to create a special committee of the independent (i.e. public) directors to undertake diligence satisfying the duty of care obligation. That committee will feel obliged to hire independent counsel and its own investment banker. It may believe that its duty requires a shopping of the bid, which could cause the pre-emptive offer to go away. But how do we know that there isn’t a $35 per share offer just waiting out there? (I commented on this in connection with Lyondell back in 2008.) As any transactional lawyer knows, time means deal risk.
I’m not suggesting that the duty of care obligations imposed by the corporate law are wrong in change of control cases, but their imposition in Smith v. Van Gorkom (where the essence of the decision was that, regardless of the attractiveness of the offer, the board went too fast and wasn’t careful enough) provoked the adoption of §102(b)(7), exculpating the directors from monetary liability on account of any breach of the duty of care largely because they were held liable in a “devil if you do – devil if you don’t” circumstance. That is to say, §102(b)(7) is an implicit acknowledgment that broad and standardized fiduciary obligations are sometimes overbroad. But there’s really no way, at least logically, to tell a board when a bid is sufficiently pre-emptive as to trump the ordinary procedural precautions.
The great benefit of Delaware LLC and LP law, in providing that the usual fiduciary duties apply as a default matter, but permitting the parties to eliminate or modify them, as one cannot under the corporate law, is precisely the customization that would have been useful here. Assuming no penalty in the market for having organized as a public limited partnership or LLC (see Blackstone Group LP), that form would have allowed the governing organizational document to waive any fiduciary obligation of the board or the majority owner in connection with the consideration of a seemingly pre-emptive offer, and avoided delay and the associated risk to the deal.
With all due respect to Chief Justice Strine and Chancellor Laster, I still don’t believe this has anything to do with the magic of private ordering in contract. As I’ve written extensively, I think there’s significant illusion among lawyers and law professors about the extent to which any text capable of colorable competing interpretations actually reflects any mutual intention even if it was the subject of arm’s-length negotiation. That’s because I tend to believe that even sophisticated parties to sophisticated contracts put in a lot of boilerplate they hope maps accurately the twists and turns of future events or, more importantly, clearly favors them if there’s ever a dispute. And when there is a later dispute, they turn to the text and hope to hell there’s something helpful in it. So I’ve never been under the misapprehension that the operating agreement or partnership agreement of a publicly held LLC or LP reflects real intentions about the resolution of later disputes any more than corporate bylaws or the rights and preferences of a class of stock.
The LLC or LP form is just an alternative map or model, with alternative rights and obligations. In the case that bugged me, it would have been a way to avoid a problem the corporate model really couldn’t quite get right. Whether that’s “contract” or something else, reinstating standardized or mandatory fiduciary obligations strikes me as eliminating the very choice the different forms were meant to offer.
-Jeff Lipshaw