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Haskell Murray

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Professor Murray teaches business law, business ethics, and alternative dispute resolution courses to undergraduate and graduate students. Currently, his research focuses on corporate governance, mergers & acquisitions, sports law, and social entrepreneurship law issues.

Professor Murray is the 2018-19 President of the Southeastern Academy of Legal Studies in Business (“SEALSB”) and is a co-editor of the Business Law Professor Blog. His articles have been published in a variety of journals, including the American Business Law Journal, the Delaware Journal of Corporate Law, the Harvard Business Law Review, and the Maryland Law Review. Read More

I was fascinated by Ann Lipton’s post on April 14.  I started to type a comment, but it got too long.  That’s when I realized it was actually a responsive blog post.  

Ann’s post, which posits (among other things) that corporate chief executives might be required to comply with their fiduciary duties when they are acting in their capacity as private citizens, really made me think.  I understand her concern.  I do think it is different from the disclosure duty issues that I and others scope out in prior work.  (Thanks for the shout-out on that, Ann.)  Yet, I struggled to find a concise and effective response to Ann’s post. Here is what I have come up with so far.  It may be inadequate, but it’s a start, at least.

Fiduciary duties are contextual.  One can have fiduciary duties to more than one independent legal person at the same time, of course, proving this point. (Think of those overlapping directors, Arledge and Chitiea in Weinberger.  They’re a classic example!)  What enables folks to know how to act in these situations is a proper identification of the circumstances in which the person is acting.

So, for example, an agent’s…

My essay on the use of traditional for-profit corporations as a choice of entity for sustainable social enterprise firms was recently published in volume 86 of the UMKC Law Review.  I spoke on this topic at The Bryan Cave/Edward A. Smith Symposium: The Green Economy held at the UMKC School of Law back in October.  The essay is entitled “Let’s Not Give Up on Traditional For-Profit Corporations for Sustainable Social Enterprise,” and the SSRN abstract is included below:

The past ten years have witnessed the birth of (among other legal business forms) the low-profit limited liability company (commonly known as the L3C), the social purpose corporation, and the benefit corporation. The benefit corporation has become a legal form of entity in over 30 states. The significant number of state legislative adoptions of new social enterprise forms of entity indicates that policy makers believe these alternative forms of entity serve a purpose (whether legal or extra legal).

The rise of specialty forms of entity for social enterprise, however, calls into question, for many, the continuing role of the traditional for-profit corporation (for the sake of brevity and convenience, denominated “TFPC” in this essay) in social enterprises, including green economy ventures.

Call for Papers for the

Section on Business Associations Program on

Contractual Governance: the Role of Private Ordering

at the 2019 Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting

The AALS Section on Business Associations is pleased to announce a Call for Papers from which up to two additional presenters will be selected for the section’s program to be held during the AALS 2019 Annual Meeting in New Orleans on Contractual Governance: the Role of Private Ordering.  The program will explore the use of contracts to define and modify the governance structure of business entities, whether through corporate charters and bylaws, LLC operating agreements, or other private equity agreements.  From venture capital preferred stock provisions, to shareholder involvement in approval procedures, to forum selection and arbitration, is the contract king in establishing the corporate governance contours of firms?  In addition to paper presenters, the program will feature prominent panelists, including SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce and Professor Jill E. Fisch of the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Our Section is proud to partner with the following co-sponsoring sections: Agency, Partnership, LLC’s and Unincorporated Associations; Contracts; Securities Regulation; and Transactional Law & Skills.

Submission Information:

Please submit an abstract or draft of…

I learned earlier this afternoon that Lynn Stout, author of The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations and the Public (2012), lost her battle with cancer today.  Appropriate words are hard to come by.  She was among the nation’s scholarly leaders in the legal aspects of corporate governance.  Regardless of whether you agree with her on the substance, you would likely find her work enlightening and her presence powerful.  She was persistent in argument, yet generous with mentoring and other professional support.

I know we each will miss her in our own way.  She and I had a bit of an unfinished conversation last June at the National Business Law Scholars Conference about my Washington & Lee Law Review article, “Shareholder Wealth Maximization as a Function of Statutes, Decisional Law, and Organic Documents.”  I am sorry we never completed that chat.

Her vast body of work is among her great legacies.  I have my Advanced Business Associations students read “A Team Production Theory of Corporate Law” (coauthored with Margaret Blair) every year.  Other articles that I have enjoyed and used in teaching or research include: “Why We Should Stop…

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.

This timely post comes to us from Jeremy R. McClane, Associate Professor of Law and Cornelius J. Scanlon Research Scholar at the University of Connecticut School of Law.  Jeremy can be reached at jeremy.mcclane@uconn.edu. 
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Spotify, the Swedish music streaming company known for disrupting the music market might do the same thing this week to the equity capital markets. On April 3, Spotify plans to go public but in an unusual way. Instead of issuing new stock and enlisting an underwriter to build a book of orders and provide liquidity, Spotify plans to cut out the middleman and list stock held by existing shareholders directly on the New York Stock Exchange.

This will be an interesting experiment that will test some prevailing assumptions that about how firms must raise capital from the public.

The Importance of Bookbuilding. First, we will see just how important bookbuilding is to ensuring a successful IPO. When most companies go public, they hire an underwriter to market the shares in what is known as a “firm commitment” underwriting. The investment banks commit to finding buyers for all of the shares, or purchasing any unsold shares themselves if they cannot find buyers (an occurrence which never happens in practice). The process involves visiting institutional investors and building a book of orders, which are then used to gauge demand and set a price at which to float the stock. The benefit of this process is risk management – the issuing company and its underwriters try to ensure that the offering will be a success (and the price won’t plummet or experience volatile ups and downs) by setting a price at a level that they know market demand will bear, and ensuring that there are orders for all of the shares even before they are sold into the market.

Without underwriters or bookbuilding, Spotify is taking a risk that its share price will be set at the wrong level and become unstable. In Spotify’s case, however there is already relatively active trading of shares in private transactions, which gives the company some indication of what the right price should be. Nonetheless, that indication of price is volatile, in part because the securities laws limit the market for its shares by restricting the number of pre-IPO shareholders to 2,000, at least in the US. In 2017 for example, the price of Spotify’s shares traded in private transactions ranging from $37.50 to $125.00, according to the company’s Form F-1 registration statement.

Brent Horton of Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business recently posted his American Business Law Journal article on pre-Securities Act prospectuses.

For interested readers, the abstract is below and the article can be downloaded here.

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Some legal scholars—skeptics—question the conventional wisdom that corporations failed to provide adequate information to prospective investors before the passage of the Securities Act of 1933 (Securities Act). These skeptics argue that the Securities Act’s disclosure requirements were largely unnecessary. For example, Paul G. Mahoney in his 2015 book, Wasting A Crisis: Why Securities Regulation Fails, relied on the fact that the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) imposed disclosure requirements in the 1920s to conclude that stories about poor pre-Act disclosure are “demonstrably wrong”. (Likewise, Roberta Romano argued in Empowering Investors that “there is little tangible proof” that disclosure was inadequate pre-Securities Act.) 

This Article sets out to determine who is correct, those that accept the conventional wisdom that pre-Securities Act disclosure was inadequate, or the skeptics?

The Author examined twenty-five stock prospectuses (the key piece of disclosure provided to prospective investors) that predate the Securities Act. This primary-source documentation strongly suggests that—contrary to the assertions of skeptics—pre-Act prospectuses did fail to provide potential …

As many readers have likely seen from the client updates going out from law firms, the Fifth Circuit struck down the Department of Labor’s fiduciary rule on March 15th.  A divided panel ruled that Labor overstepped its authority when issuing the rule.  A copy of the opinion is available here.  

One thing that jumped out to me as I read the opinion was the characterization of persons that hold themselves out to the public and advertise their services as financial advisers as mere “salespeople.”  Admittedly, the law here is a mess.  The biggest problem I see is that the SEC never held the line on only allowing stockbrokers to give “incidental” advice to make use of the broker-dealer exception to the Investment Advisers Act.  That provisions exempts brokerage houses from the Investment Advisers Act if it’s “a “broker or dealer” whose advice is “solely incidental to the conduct of his business as a broker or dealer and who receives no special compensation therefor.” 15 U.S.C. § 80b-2(a)(11)(C).  Of course, one wonders why someone would work with a self-described financial adviser if not for the advice.

Labor has until April 30 to make a decision about whether to seek en banc review.

I had the pleasure of taking a group of students to Washington for the most recent meeting of the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee.  Among other things, they discussed issues with dual class shares.  In a nutshell, dual class shares give one set of shareholders much greater voting control than other sets.  In practice, it provides a means for insiders to permanently entrench themselves and retain control over a corporation even as their economic stake declines.  A number of leading companies (Facebook, Snapchat, and Google) have pursued similar structures aimed at entrenching existing founders and owners.

The committee issued a recommendation and suggested that the Commission take a close look at the kinds of risks these arrangements may create.  It also highlighted how these developments could widen the separation between ownership and control for many corporations:

For instance, while Snap disclosed the major governance provisions it planned to adopt, its IPO registration statement did not clearly disclose that those provisions would enable each of the co-founders to reduce his equity stake to below 1% of total economic ownership without relinquishing control. The fact that the governance structure adopted by Snap could – without further shareholder check – lead over time to such a dramatic divergence

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The main premise behind self-regulation is that an industry has an incentive to police its ranks if industry members bear the costs of misbehavior.  An organized industry won’t tolerate particular industry members cheating or taking advantage to get an edge for themselves if it imposes greater costs on the industry as a whole.  Notice here that profit-seeking industry self-regulators will construe “misbehavior” as actions that impose costs or reduce the profits of the industry as a whole—not necessarily as activities that generate costs elsewhere.  For example, self-regulating manufacturers may not limit environmental pollution because distant customers do not bear the environmental costs generated by their operations.   Their customers may even prefer pollution-spewing factories because they pay less for goods and bear no liability for the environmental cleanup.

The New York Stock Exchange’s history as a self-regulating exchange bears this out.  Traditionally, the NYSE aggressively policed its own ranks to prevent its members from undercutting the standard fixed commission rates.   It did not, however, aggressively police its members’ extraordinarily profitable market-manipulating stock pools.   The incentive to self-police, therefore, failed to check exploitation of the public for at least two reasons:  (i) the NYSE members that did not participate in the stock…