April 2017

The internet is a wonderful thing; this week, it has brought us two powerful new tools related to business law.

First, the Center for Political Accountability has aggregated the political spending disclosures of public companies in a handy, searchable website.  Granted, it’s a limited tool: it only includes companies in the S&P 500 (or that were in the S&P 500 as of 2015) – and unfortunately the descriptions on the site are less than clear on this point.  To that extent, then, it is useful as a sample of corporate behavior, but not as useful for specific shareholder or consumer action.  In that vein, I view it as something of a pilot project, demonstrating the theoretical power of the internet to harness these kinds of disclosures.  There are already apps that make it easier for consumers to express their political preferences – Boycott Trump and Buycott.com, for example.  This new site is another weapon – or potentially one –  in the arsenal. 

Marcia has expressed doubt that these kinds of campaigns work, and certainly there’s the countermobilization problem – a campaign on one side the political aisle may motivate those on the other side – but my own…

We are in the middle of the final exam period, so this post will be short.

A friend of mine recently told me about a situation where he had been cheated out of a few thousand dollars. A clear contract was involved, and based on the facts I was told, the other party seems obviously in the wrong.

These situations, even if clear from the legal side, are often not worth pursuing through litigation in our current U.S. system. As most readers surely know, in the U.S. parties generally have to pay their own lawyers regardless of the outcome. In some situations, the lawyers may take the case on contingency, but most lawyers I know will not take a contingency case where the maximum recovery is a few thousand dollars. Maybe small claims court would be appropriate, but the learning and time costs involved may outweigh the potential recovery.

Perhaps this is as it should be. Perhaps we want parties to settle these smaller disputes outside the courts.

But, especially when the party in the wrong is much larger, and especially when the wrong is quite clear, it seems like we might want the courts involved to prevent this type of bad action…

The following comes to us from Brian Quinn:

Access to the Courts in the Transactional Setting

2018 AALS Annual Meeting
San Diego, CA

This call for papers solicits unpublished papers that analyze the question of access to the courts in a variety of transactional law settings.

From small business disputes, to mandatory consumer arbitration, to restrictions on shareholder lawsuits, it is no longer obvious that parties will have access to courts in the event of a dispute. In many cases small businesses may negotiate for alternative dispute resolution in commercial contracts as more efficient than going to courts. In others, like in the context of consumer contracting, restricting access to the courts is not typically subject of negotiation, and many consumer transactions now come with mandatory arbitration clauses. In recent years, in response to an explosion in shareholder and class action litigation, corporations also began to look to a variety of self-help remedies (often aided by state legislatures), including exclusive forum provisions and fee-shifting provisions among others, to restrict access to the courts by shareholders.

Taken together one could reasonably question whether the current trajectory in common business and consumer settings to limit parties and third parties access to…

Last week, a reporter interviewed me regarding conflict minerals.The reporter specifically asked whether I believed there would be more litigation on conflict minerals and whether the SEC’s lack of enforcement would cause companies to stop doing due diligence. I am not sure which, if any, of my remarks will appear in print so I am posting some of my comments below:

I expect that if conflict minerals legislation survives, it will take a different form. The SEC asked for comments at the end of January, and I’ve read most of the comment letters. Many, including Trillium Asset Management, focus on the need to stay the course with the Rule, citing some success in making many mines conflict free. Others oppose the rule because of the expense. However, it appears that the costs haven’t been as high as most people expected, and indeed many of the tech companies such as Apple and Intel have voiced support for the rule. It’s likely that they have already operationalized the due diligence. The SEC has limits on what it can do, so I expect Congress to take action, unless there is an executive order from President Trump, which people have been expecting since February. 
 
The Senate

…

COLLECTIVE BOOK ON LEGAL INNOVATION

Call for submissions

The program « Law & Management » developed by the European Center of Law and Economics (known as CEDE in French) of ESSEC Business School, is an innovative and pioneering research program which aims to study the use of law as a competitive factor.

In this regard, the members of the research program « Law & Management » have decided to publish a collective book focusing on legal innovation. This book, co-edited by A. Masson (ESSEC) and D. Orozco (Florida State University), will analyze, by crossing the points of view of lawyers and creative specialists, the concept and life cycle of legal innovations, techniques and services, whether they are related to legislation, legal engineering, legal services, legal strategies…, as well as the role of law as a source of creativity and interdisciplinary teamwork. All the techniques that could facilitate legal innovations from the perspective of design thinking to predictive design, through the customer experience will be analyzed.

The program Board is now opening the call for proposals. Papers proposals (consisting in a brief summary in English) of a maximum length of 1000 words, should be sent to …

More than a few legal blogs and scholars have taken note of a recent paper by Adam Bonica (Stanford University), Adam S. Chilton (University of Chicago), Kyle Rozema (Northwestern University) and Maya Sen (Harvard University), “The Legal Academy’s Ideological Uniformity.”  The paper finds that those in the legal academy are more liberal than those in legal profession generally.  Anecdotally, I have to say I am not surprised. 

The abstract of the piece is as follows:

We find that approximately 15% of law professors are conservative and that only approximately one out of every twenty law schools have more conservative law professors than liberal ones. In addition, we find that these patterns vary, with higher-ranked schools having an even smaller presence of conservative law professors. We then compare the ideological balance of the legal academy to that of the legal profession. Compared to the 15% of law professors that are conservative, 35% of lawyers overall are conservative. Law professors are more liberal than graduates of top 14 law schools, lawyers working at the largest law firms, former federal law clerks, and federal judges. Although we find that professors are more liberal than the alumni at all but a handful of law schools, there is a strong relationship between

…

As a business lawyer in private practice, I found it very frustrating when the principals of business entity clients acted in contravention of my advice.  This didn’t happen too often in my 15 years of practice.  But when it did, I always wondered whether I could have stopped the madness by doing something differently in my representation of the client.

Thanks to friend and Wayne State University Law School law professor Peter Henning, who often writes on insider trading and other white collar crime issues for the New York Times DealBook (see, e.g., this recent piece), I had the opportunity to revisit this issue through my research and present that research at a symposium at Wayne Law back in the fall of 2015.  The law review recently published the resulting short article, which I have posted to SSRN.  The abstract is set forth below.

Sometimes, business entity clients and their principals do not seek, accept, or heed the advice of their lawyers. In fact, sometimes, they expressly disregard a lawyer’s instructions on how to proceed. In certain cases, the client expressly rejects the lawyer’s advice. However, some business constituents who take action contrary to the advice of legal counsel…

I’m sure we’ve all been riveted by the colorful activist campaign led by Elliott Management Corp challenging the board of directors at Arconic Inc.  In some tellings, it’s a classic battle over whether companies should focus on immediate returns to shareholders (and whether activist pressure encourages short-term thinking), or whether companies should invest in innovation and research in hopes of a longer-term payoff.

This week, Elliott’s challenge netted it a scalp in the form of the forced resignation of the CEO, Klaus Kleinfeld, for sending a personal letter to the head of Elliott Management that vaguely threatened to reveal some apparently scandalous behavior undertaken during the 2006 World Cup.  While denying that any such behavior occurred, Elliot Management demanded Kleinfeld’s ouster, and the Arconic Board complied.

But the battle rages on.  Earlier this month, Arconic announced that if investors voted to seat Elliott’s board nominees, it could trigger the change-of-control provisions in Arconic’s deferred compensation and retirement plans, thus forcing Arconic to make a $500 million pay out.

Which just prompted this Section 14 lawsuit by an Arconic investor, accusing Arconic of manufacturing “fake news” because there is, in fact, no risk of a change of control.  At…