July 2019

I just recently came across the Ninth Circuit’s decision in In re Atossa Genetics Inc Securities Litigation, 868 F.3d 78 (9th Cir. 2017), and it struck me because it highlights an ongoing tension between the reliance/materiality distinction in fraud-on-the-market cases in general, and in the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence in particular.

And I’ll say up front that a lot of what I’m about to discuss in this post is stuff I’ve laid out in more detail in my essay, Halliburton and the Dog that Didn’t Bark.  The Atossa case is just a nice demonstration of the issue.

And hey, this got long, so – more after the jump.

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This picture brings me joy.  It captures the mood among all of us (me, my UT Law emeritus colleague John Sobieski, and a group of UT Law students) after my last UT Law yoga session this past spring.  I need to begin to wrestle with how I will be able to teach yoga at the College of Law this coming semester, since I will be full-time back in the classroom teaching two demanding business law courses (Business Associations and Corporate Finance).  All ideas are welcomed . . . .

My law school yoga teaching came to mind this week not because I am already deep into planning the fall semester (although that comes soon) but because of two independent health/wellness items that hit my radar screen this week.  First, I was reminded that the Knoxville Bar Association (of which I am a member) is offering a full-day continuing legal education program in September entitled “Balancing the Scales of Work and Wellness – Finding Joy through Self-Care Practical Advice & Wellness Strategies”.  Second, I learned today that my UT Law colleague Paula Schaefer penned a nifty post yesterday on the Best Practices for Legal Education blog: Examples of How Law Schools …

William & Mary’s Kevin Haeberle has a new paper entitled Information Asymmetry and the Protection of Ordinary Investors.  It takes a close look at the degree to which the core securities laws designed to reduce information asymmetry actually protect ordinary investors in the stock market.  Haeberle explains how market makers adjust prices to manage the costs information asymmetry imposes on them.  He focuses on how this response creates illiquidity in the market.  But then he explains that while this illiquidity hurts many investors, it also helps others—namely, longer-term investors. Thus, reducing information asymmetry will affect different investors in different ways, turning on the time horizon of their investment. 

His  key takeaway is then that securities laws reducing information asymmetry impose a long-overlooked cost on at least buy-and-hold ordinary investors (including both those who trade directly and those who invest through mutual funds), while conferring only limited benefits to those investors. Accordingly, whatever it does for society, an excessive focus on stopping some investors from making “unfair” gains based on superior information may actually  be a bad thing for ordinary investors.

Haeberle closes out the paper by pointing out that the SEC would likely be more effective in protecting ordinary investors…

…

A recent Tennessee court decision subtly notes that limited liability companies (LLCs) are not, in fact corporations. In a recent Tennessee federal court opinion, Judge Richardson twice notes the incorrect listing of an LLC as a “limited liability corporation.”  

First, the opinion states:

The [Second Amended Complaint] alleges that Defendant Evans is a resident of Tennessee, Defendant #AE20, LLC is a California limited liability company, and Defendant Gore Capital, LLC is a Delaware limited liability “corporation.”3

3 Gore Capital is in fact a limited liability company.

FERNANDO CAMPS, Pl., v. GORE CAPITAL, LLC, KARL JAMES, ANGELA EVANS, and #AE20, LLC, Defendants., 3:17-CV-1039, 2019 WL 2763902, at *1 and n.3 (M.D. Tenn. July 2, 2019) (emphasis in original). 

Judge Richardson later notes, in footnote 11:

Plaintiff states that he was sent documents that listed Gore’s (not #AE20’s) principal place of business as being in Chattanooga, Tennessee, although the SAC lists Gore as a “Delaware limited liability corporation (sic)[.]”
Id. 2019 WL 2763902, at *6 n.11 (M.D. Tenn. July 2, 2019). 
 
Given all the times I have complained about courts not correcting such mistakes, I figured I should give this opinion a well-deserved shout out for getting this

Churchill'sPort

Avid BLPB readers may have noticed that I failed to post on Monday of last week.  I was traveling from Portugal to Spain that day.  I did plan to make this post then, but travel scrambles (thanks to the Porto metro) and delays (thanks to Ryanair) prevented me from getting to a computer with Internet access until late in the day.  By then, I was too exhausted to post.  So, you get last Monday’s post this Monday!  No harm done; this post is not time-sensitive.

Ever heard of Graham’s port?  The Graham’s port lodge was founded by brothers William and John Graham back at the beginning of the 18th century.  Fast-forward 150 years, and the Graham family sells the then-very-successful Graham’s port business to another family.  That second family still runs the Graham’s business today.

But a Graham descendant still wanted to be in the port business.  He thought he had a “better way.”  So, 11 years after the Graham family sold Graham’s, John Graham (not the same one, obviously!) established the Churchill port lodge.  Here’s what the Churchill’s website says about its formation as a business:

Churchill’s was founded in 1981 by John Graham, making it…

In reading Izabella Kaminska’s Why dealing with fintechs is a bit like dealing with pirates [FT Alphaville is free, but registration is required], I thought of two points from past blogs.  First, the critical, controversial issue of who should have access to an account at a central bank.  The article notes China’s decision to require “domestic fintechs like Alipay and WeChat…[to] hold their customer deposits on a full reserve basis at the central bank directly,” and also points to Governor Mark Carney’s recent discussion of permitting fintech companies to deposit funds at the Bank of England.  Second, the strategic point of recognizing when change is inevitable, and proactively helping to shape it.  Kaminska seems to suggest that a potential reason for this expansion in central bank account access is recent power shifts in the area, and central bankers’ desire to proactively shape the inevitable changes on the horizon in financial markets.  As is generally the case, Kaminska’s piece is a worthwhile read.      

When I was in practice, I worked on a number of cases alleging violations of Section 11 of the Securities Act, but none that had been filed in state court.  (For which I was profoundly grateful; I was always bemused by the fact that I needed to get pro hac’d into federal courts around the country but I was vastly more familiar with their rules and practices than with those of the New York State courts, notwithstanding my admission to the New York State bar).

So, to be honest, I never had any strong feelings about whether plaintiffs should have the right to pursue Section 11 class actions in state court, or whether the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act should be interpreted to permit defendants to remove such cases.  And I didn’t spare much attention when the Supreme Court recently held in Cyan, Inc. v. Beaver County Employees Retirement Fund that defendants cannot remove them.

But Michael Klausner, Jason Hegland, Carin LeVine, and Sarah Leonard just posted a short empirical analysis of state Section 11 class actions, and the results have captured my interest.  First, they find – unsurprisingly – there has been an increase in state Section 11…

Screenshot 2019-07-05 15.51.43

The dark side of entrepreneurial finance

Editors: Arvind Ashta, Olivier Toutain

Theme of the special issue

Whether we are talking about start-ups, more recently “grow up” or more broadly about company creation-takeover, entrepreneurial finance attracts a lot of attention, from the entrepreneurs’ side and from the side of private and public financing organisations and the media. Entrepreneurial finance includes Founder’s equity, Love Money, Business Angel, Venture Capital, LBO Funds, banks, IPOs and various alternative financing treated as shadow banking: micro-credit, loan sharking, leasing, crowdfunding, Initial Coin Offerings, among others (Block, Colombo, Cumming, & Vismara, 2018; Wright, Lumpkin, Zott, & Agarwal, 2016).

Financing is considered as an inherent dimension of the entrepreneurial development process (Panda, 2016; Yunus, 2003). Without financing, there is no investment and, therefore, little chance of starting a business with adequate production tools and an organization capable of absorbing the trials and tribulations of starting and developing entrepreneurial activities. Without funding, the risk of lack of legitimacy is also high: what does it mean in the entrepreneurial ecosystem not to have the support of one or more funding agencies? More so in the start-up world! Is that conceivable? Finally, can the entrepreneur now free himself from financial support, even if he does not really need it to start his business? If the reasoning is pursued further, does the entrepreneur have a choice? In other words, is it possible to create and develop your company without mobilizing the financial resources of the territory? Without entering into a financial system and ecosystem that regulates the creation and takeover of companies in a territory? Or a system that pushes the entrepreneur to finance so much that the system itself collapses by bringing forth a financial crisis (Boddy, 2011; Diamond & Rajan, 2009; Donaldson, 2012; Guérin, Labie, & Servet, 2015; Mishkin, 2011).

Applying for funding today is often considered as a difficult adventure: is it really a fighter’s path given the particularly numerous mechanisms in France? But are they also numerous in Europe? In the world? Is the cost of financing transparent or hidden (Attuel-Mendes & Ashta, 2013)? In any case, to adventure is to walk and remove obstacles while following a guide… often at the funder’s request… which is often called coaching or mentoring. Or following the guide, sometimes – or often, depending on the reader’s appreciation – results in respecting rules, imposed steps, in short, to adopt a good conduct… to such an extent that the entrepreneur can lose track of his North Star, or at least part of his project, modified by “pitching” and integrating the comments, suggestions, strong suggestions of potential funders… In other words, if we push the reflection further, the accompanying logic proposed in the form of good intentions by the funders of an ecosystem, are they not likely, by force, to respond to external constraints, to generate effects opposite to expectations: inhibited entrepreneurs, whose project has lost its originality, vitality and excellence through the coaching or mentoring of initially imagined value creation (Collewaert, 2009)? Isn’t the finance injected into the support systems finally a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde of entrepreneurship? In other words, if it constitutes an unprecedented measure of support for entrepreneurial growth in the world, does it not at the same time generate “antipreneurial” effects? Normative and highly biased, do financial actors deserve such a place in the creative process? What is it that basically legitimizes their central place? (Bateman, 2010; Sinclair, 2012) What is the hidden face of entrepreneurial finance (Henderson & Pearson, 2011; Krohmer, Lauterbach, & Calanog, 2009; Toe, Hollandts, & Valiorgue, 2017)?

The purpose of this issue is to extract itself from the normative fields and discourses that highlight, in the vast majority of cases, the important role of finance in the development of entrepreneurship, whether purely economic, social or environmental. In other words, we are asking ourselves here about the secondary, even hidden, effects of finance on the emergence and development of new companies in France and around the world.

The proposals will address, among other things, the following topics:

  • What place does finance occupy today in the feeling of success and accomplishment of an entrepreneurial activity?
  • How do entrepreneurs interact with potential funders?
  • How do funders dialogue with each other?
  • How do funders make their investment decisions? Rationality, Short termism, information asymmetry….
  • How do entrepreneurs and funders negotiate? On which elements of the project or company? Are there any losers? What is lost in the process?
  • How does the relationship between entrepreneurs and funders change over time?
  • Can finance harm the value creation produced by entrepreneurial activity? Can it affect entrepreneurial freedom?
  • Is it possible to free oneself from financing circuits? How?

Finally, what is the dark side of entrepreneurial finance?

Timeline:

Submission of texts: By April 30, 2020 at the latest

Publication: March 2021

[I have omitted here the list of references supporting the text citations.  Please contact me by email if you would like a .pdf copy of the call for papers that includes the list.  There is more information after the jump.]

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