April 2018

The Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation is pleased to announce the availability of positions of Post-Graduate Academic Fellows in the areas of corporate governance and law and finance. Qualified candidates who are interested in working with the Program as Post-Graduate Academic Fellows may apply at any time and the start date is flexible.
Candidates should be interested in spending two to three years at Harvard Law School (longer periods may be possible). Candidates should have a J.D., LL.M., or S.J.D. from a U.S. law school, or a Ph.D. in economics, finance, or related areas by the time they commence their fellowship. Candidates still pursuing an S.J.D. or Ph.D. are eligible so long as they will have completed their program’s coursework requirements by the time they start. During the term of their appointment, Post-Graduate Academic Fellows work on research and corporate governance activities of the Program, depending on their skills, interests, and Program needs. Fellows may also work on their own research and publishing in preparation for a career in academia or policy research. Former Fellows of the Program now teach in leading law schools in the U.S. and abroad.
Interested candidates should submit a CV,

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I often use my space here to complain about courts and lawmakers being imprecise with regard to limited liability companies (LLCs).  Today, I will focus on my home state of West Virginia, which recently passed a bill to support (and provide loans for cooperatives designed to provide) much-needed broadband development in the state. I applaud the effort, but the execution was not great.  

Here’s an example from the West Virginia Code: 

12-6C-11. Legislative findings; loans for industrial development; availability of funds and interest rates.

. . . .

(f) The directors of the board shall bear no fiduciary responsibility with regard to any of the loans contemplated in this section.

This applies to a cooperative board that takes on loans for broadband projects.  But it doesn’t make sense. I think they used “fiduciary” when they meant “financial,” as I assume they meant to say that the board members of the organization would not have “financial liability.”  I am pretty sure they did not mean to remove fiduciary duties.  Then again, who knows. Maybe they are fine with the directors using loans for personal vacations.  (Just kidding. I am pretty sure they’d care.)  I know that in finance, the term fiduciary…

Last week, the Neel Corporate Governance Center at UT Knoxville hosted one of UT Knoxville’s alums, Ron Ford, as a featured speaker.  He gave a great talk on boards of directors, from his unique vantage point–that of a CFO.  In the course of his remarks, he mentioned a public company corporate gpvernance policy that I had not earlier heard of: a CEO limit or prohibition on outside board service (other than local, small nonprofit board service).  A 2017 study found that:

Only 22% of S&P 500 boards set a specific limit in their corporate governance guidelines on the CEO’s outside board service; 65% of those boards limit CEOs to two outside boards, and 32% set the limit at one outside board. One board does not allow the company CEO to serve on any outside corporate boards, and two boards allow their CEO to serve on three outside corporate boards.

This may be why I had not heard about governance policies limiting board service; it seems these policies may be relatively uncommon.  I know from experience that CEOs do serve on outside boards and often consider that service an important way to learn valuable things that can be implemented at the firm that enjoys them.

What is the ostensible purpose of a policy restricting the outside board service of a firm’s CEO?  Perhaps it is obvious.  It seems that most firms imposing this kind of restriction on CEOs desire to prevent the CEO from spending significant time on his or her service as a board member of another firm to the detriment of the firm by which he or she is employed as chief executive.  An online article succinctly captures the capacity for distraction.

. . . CEOs must weigh . . . the potential disadvantage of having to navigate a crisis. David Larcker, a professor at Stanford Law School and senior faculty at the university’s corporate governance center, says that while most CEOs would say that serving on an outside board is highly valuable, everything changes if either company comes up against a big challenge.

“Where it gets really complicated for a sitting CEO is if something happens,” Larcker says. “You’re a takeover target. You have a big restatement. You’re replacing a CEO. That’s harder to predict and takes up a lot of time.”

Are there CEOs who have experienced this kind of distraction?  Yes.  A Forbes contributor offers a well-known example in an article entitled “All Operating Executives Should Never Serve On Any Outside Boards“:

A good poster child of outside board distractions was Meg Whitman in her final 2 years at the helm of eBay (EBAY). During this time, she joined the boards of Proctor & Gamble and DreamWorks Animation. EBay flew Meg around to Cincinnati and LA board meetings on their private jet. EBay’s stock sank. Meg bought Skype. It didn’t help.

The same article also calls out two Yahoo! CEOs as further examples.  And there are others.  See also, e.g., here.

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On Friday, Elisabeth Kempf presented her new paper, co-authored with Oliver Spalt, at Tulane’s Freeman School of Business, Taxing Successful Innovation: The Hidden Cost of Meritless Class Action Lawsuits. Here is the abstract:

Meritless securities class action lawsuits disproportionally target firms with successful innovations.  We establish this fact using data on securities class action lawsuits against U.S. corporations between 1996 and 2011 and the private economic value of a firm’s newly granted patents as a measure of innovative success. Our findings suggest that the U.S. securities class action system imposes a substantial implicit “tax” on highly innovative firms, thereby reducing incentives to innovate ex ante. Changes in investment opportunities and corporate disclosure induced by the innovation appear to make successful innovators attractive litigation targets.

Using dismissal as a proxy for meritless – a point to which I will return – Kempf and Spalt find that firms that are granted valuable patents are more likely to be targeted by a class action lawsuit than other firms in the following year, and that the difference is driven by meritless lawsuits.  The finding persists even controlling for firm size, sales growth, stock price returns, and volatility.  They also find that these lawsuits…

Within the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will decide a trio of cases about class action waivers, which I wrote about here. The Court will decide whether these waivers in mandatory arbitration agreements violate the National Labor Relations Act (which also applies in the nonunion context) or are permissible under the Federal Arbitration Act. 

I wonder if the Supreme Court clerks helping to draft the Court’s opinion(s) are reading today’s report by the Economic Policy Institute about the growing use of mandatory arbitration. The author of the report reviewed survey responses from 627 private sector employers with 50 employees or more. The report explained that over fifty-six percent of private sector, nonunion employees or sixty million Americans must go to arbitration to address their workplace rights. Sixty-five percent of employers with more than one thousand employees use arbitration provisions. One-third of employers that require mandatory arbitration include the kind of class action waivers that the Court is looking at now. Significantly, women, low-wage workers, and African-Americans are more likely to work for employers that require arbitration. Businesses in Texas, North Carolina, and California (a pro-worker state) are especially fond of the provisions. In most of the highly populated states, over forty…

Most Americans lack basic financial literacy.  One recent study found that about two thirds of Americans cannot correctly answer basic questions about interest rates and ordinary economic calculations.  It isn’t a surprising finding.  Put simply, most people need help when it comes to handling financial planning and investing decisions.

There are different ways to solve the problem.  One way is to focus on increasing financial literacy by doing more education and outreach.  That approach hasn’t shown great results so far.  Another mechanism for improving financial decision-making is to pair people with competent financial advisers and planners.   In theory, financial advisers can improve financial outcomes for their clients by helping them make the best decisions for their situation.  Unfortunately, the law in most states doesn’t require persons providing financial advice to act in the best interests of their clients.  Nevada is a notable, recent exception.

Many people working with financial advisers walk in with a mistaken default expectation that financial advisers must give advice in the best interests of their clients.  This perception may exist because of the constant drumbeat of trust-focused advertisements from financial services firms. With mismatched expectations and commission-compensated financial advisers, ordinary customers routinely find themselves steered…

Keith Paul Bishop, at the California Corporate and Securities Blog, provides an example of a court that actually pays attention to entity type. As he says, “it is nice to see that some judges do recognize that LLCs are not corporations.” It sure is.  In the case he cites, D.R. Mason Constr. Co. v. GBOD, LLC, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 41236, the court gets a lot right:

[A]lthough Plaintiff’s Complaint does separately mention the term “shareholder,” [*13]  the Court will not draw the inference that this term means Plaintiff was promised traditional “stock.” This inference would not be reasonable in these circumstances because Plaintiff alleges in its Complaint that Defendant GBOD is a limited liability company, not a corporation. (Compl. ¶ 3.) Under California law, LLCs distribute “membership interests,” not shares of stock. See Cal. Corp. Code § 17704.07. Consequently, Plaintiff’s pleading indicates the financial instrument at issue is not traditional stock. Moreover, courts tasked with deciding whether LLC membership interests constitute a security under the Exchange Act generally evaluate whether such interests are “investment contracts,” not “stocks.”

It is nice to see a court that acknowledges the different entity types and frustrating that this is not the norm. As…