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Ann Lipton

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Ann M. Lipton is a Professor of Law and Laurence W. DeMuth Chair of Business Law at the University of Colorado Law School.  An experienced securities and corporate litigator who has handled class actions involving some of the world’s largest companies, she joined the Tulane Law faculty in 2015 after two years as a visiting assistant professor at Duke University School of Law.

As a scholar, Lipton explores corporate governance, the relationships between corporations and investors, and the role of corporations in society.  Read more.

Judge Rakoff’s decision in In re Nine West LBO Securities Litigation, 2020 WL 7090277 (S.D.N.Y. Dec. 4, 2020) is all the rage these days.  The short version is that Nine West was taken private in a leveraged buyout by Sycamore; as part of the deal, allegedly the Sycamore buyers caused the company to sell the profitable subsidiaries to its own affiliates for less than they were worth, and the whole thing ended in Nine West’s bankruptcy.  In the wake of all of this, the debtholders (many of whom held debt that predated the sale), via the litigation trustee, sued Nine West’s former directors – the ones who had approved the sale – for violating their fiduciary duties by negotiating a deal that would result in the company’s bankruptcy.  Last year, Judge Rakoff refused to dismiss the claims, in a decision that spawned a thousand law firm updates about directors’ duties when selling the company.

But what I find interesting is how little anyone – including Judge Rakoff – seems to have interrogated the legal question of to whom the directors’ fiduciary duties were owed.

The classic Delaware formulation is that directors owe a duty to advance the…

Last week, I blogged about the dominance of Delaware organizational law and its implications for the laws of other states.  Which is why I was so interested to when Omari Scott Simmons posted his new paper, The Federal Option: Delaware as De Facto Agency, which takes a (sort of) different view.  He argues that Delaware has become de facto federal agency, delegated by the federal government the power to make corporate law nationally, and that this system works well for now, though there might be circumstances where federal chartering – and the structural oversight that would come with it – might be appropriate.  These could include situations where companies have received governmental bailouts, or where companies have committed significant wrongdoing and subject themselves to federal oversight as part of their settlement.

Of course, the concerns I’ve expressed in my posts are of a slightly different order – they’re about Delaware organizational law extending beyond the boundaries of internal affairs (and Delaware’s ability to define those boundaries in the first place) – but still, it’s an interesting holistic look at Delaware’s role in the corporate governance ecosystem.  Here is the abstract:

Despite over 200 years of deliberation and debate,

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I’ve previously expressed concern about Delaware organizational law intruding into other states’ spaces.  A new entry into the genre is VC Slights’s opinion in AG Resource Holdings, LLC, et al. v. Thomas Bradford Terral.

In AG Resource Holdings, Thomas Terral cofounded an LLC called AG Resource Management.  The business was eventually bought out by a private equity firm and restructured as a holding company, AG Resource Holdings LLC, that wholly owned the operating subsidiary, AG Resource Management LLC.  Terral was designated as one of several managers of the LLCs, and also was an officer.

Terral’s contractual obligations were embodied in separate agreements.  First, he had an Employment Agreement, which had various noncompetes, and a Delaware choice of law clause.  Second, the LLC agreements themselves required him to act in good faith and not compete, and chose Delaware law, and Delaware forums, to resolve any disputes. 

Terral was fired after it was discovered he was planning to compete with the companies, and he filed a complaint in Louisiana seeking to have the noncompete in the Employment Agreement declared unenforceable.  Terral’s argument – which a Louisiana court accepted on a motion for a preliminary injunction – was that because…

Almost exactly one year ago, I blogged about an unusual books and records lawsuit involving Facebook.  The plaintiffs were seeking documents pertaining to Facebook’s $5 billion settlement with the FTC, on the theory that Facebook had improperly agreed to pay larger fines in order to protect Mark Zuckerberg, personally, from liability.  That, the plaintiffs claimed, was an interested transaction involving a controlling shareholder, subject to entire fairness review if not cleansed using MFW procedures.

As I said at the time, the reason this struck me as novel was because the entire lawsuit depended on Delaware’s slow evolution of thinking surrounding controlling shareholder transactions, and highlighted the box Delaware has put itself in.  Is it true that any controlling shareholder transaction gets entire fairness review absent MFW procedures?  Because if the controlling shareholder involved in day-to-day operations, that’s a very broad rule, and if that’s not the rule, what kinds of transactions qualify?

Anyhoo, VC Slights just issued his opinion in the 220 action and the remarkable thing about it is that it says … nothing.

I mean, it says something, obviously, it holds that (1) plaintiffs may obtained non-privileged electronic communications pertaining to the settlement and (2) plaintiffs…

After Ben posted about the GameStop Affair last week, Joan predicted that the saga would be a “great gift to law professors.”  That seems about right, because here I am with a post about the subsidiary issue of Robinhood, or rather, Robinhood’s platform.

FINRA just issued a report on its current Risk Monitoring and Examination Activities, which highlights certain areas that FINRA will be investigating going forward.  It doesn’t mention Robinhood by name, but it flags some of Robinhood’s practices for special attention and, in particular, its game-like user interface.  In specific, it says:

we are increasingly focused on communications relating to certain new products, and how member firms supervise, comply with recordkeeping obligations, and address risks relating to new digital communication channels. This focus includes risks associated with app-based platforms with interactive or “game-like” features that are intended to influence customers, their related forms of marketing, and the appropriateness of the activity that they are approving clients to undertake through those platforms (e.g., under FINRA Rule 2360 (Options)).

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While such features may improve customers’ access to firm systems and investment products, they may also result in increased risks to customers if not designed with

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Tulane Law School invites applications for a Forrester Fellowship. Forrester Fellowships are designed for promising scholars who plan to apply for tenure-track law school positions. The Fellows are full-time faculty in the law school and are encouraged to participate in all aspects of the intellectual life of the school. The law school provides significant support, both formal and informal, including faculty mentors, a professional travel budget, and opportunities to present works-in-progress in various settings.

 

Tulane’s Forrester Fellows teach legal writing in the first-year curriculum in a program coordinated by the Director of Legal Writing. Fellows are appointed to a one-year term with the possibility of a single one-year renewal. Applicants must have a JD from an ABA-accredited law school, outstanding academic credentials, and significant law-related practice and/or clerkship experience. Candidates should apply through Interfolio at http://apply.interfolio.com/82676. If you have any questions, please contact Erin Donelon at edonelon@tulane.edu.

 

The law school aims to fill this position by March 2021. Tulane is an equal opportunity employer and encourages women and members of minority communities to apply.

Paul Mahoney and Adriana Robertson just posted a fascinating new paper arguing that many index providers are, in fact, investment advisers under the legal definition, and therefore should be deemed to owe fiduciary duties to the mutual funds who license their indices. 

The paper builds on Robertson’s earlier work studying index funds, including her finding that many indices are “bespoke”; they are created in order to be licensed to a single fund.  Notice how the fees work in that scenario: the fund itself can charge a low management fee for a purported “passive” fund, and then bundled with other fees is an additional fee to license the index – often created by an affiliate of the fund.  And, in fact, she finds that ETFs that call themselves passive but license an index from an affiliate charge higher fees than those that do not use an affiliated license provider.

Anyhoo, the new paper with Mahoney takes this to the next logical conclusion: in these kinds of cases, the index provider is serving as an investment adviser to the fund, and should be regulated that way.

So much so, it seems, that they will go out of their way to make sure a securities fraud claim survives a motion to dismiss.

I speak of In re Mindbody Securities Litigation, 2020 WL 5751173 (SDNY Sept. 25, 2020) and Karri v. Oclaro, 2020 WL 5982097 (N.D. Cal. Oct. 8, 2020).

The problem for courts in this context is that projections of future performance are protected by the PSLRA safe harbor.  Which means, faced with plausible allegations that corporate insiders were talking down the stock’s potential in order to persuade shareholders to accept a bad deal, courts feel they need to find some other basis on which to sustain the claim.

In Mindbody – the facts of which are also colorfully described in a related Chancery action for breach of fiduciary duty – that basis turned out to be the defendants’ statements about the value of the merger consideration relative to the (artificially low) stock price.  The defendants were alleged to have intentionally lowballed their earnings guidance in order to sink the stock, so that the merger offer would seem generous by comparison.  But by the end of the quarter, defendants had in their possession the true…