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Alicia Plerhoples (Georgetown) has the details about the first benefit corporation IPO: Laureate Education.*

She promises more analysis on SocEntLaw (where I am also a co-editor) in the near future.

The link to Laureate Education’s S-1 is here. Laureate Education has chosen the Delaware public benefit corporation statute to organize under, rather than one of the states that more closely follows the Model Benefit Corporation Legislation. I wrote about the differences between Delaware and the Model here.

Plum Organics (also a Delaware public benefit corporation) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the publicly-traded Campbell’s Soup, but it appears that Laureate Education will be the first stand-alone publicly traded benefit corporation.

*Remember that there are differences between certified B corporations and benefit corporations. Etsy, which IPO’d recently, is currently only a certified B corporation. Even Etsy’s own PR folks confused the two terms in their initial announcement of their certification.

Unfortunately, touting a business as socially-consious does not seem to lessen the chance of scandal.

Some companies known for their commitment to social causes have been in the news for all the wrong reasons. A few are noted below:

Predictably, the media latches onto these stories and claims of hypocrisy fly. See, e.g., Here’s The Joke Of A Sustainability Report That VW Put Out Last Year and Whole Foods Sales Sour After Price Scandal and BP’s Hypocrisy Problems.

No business is perfect, so what should social businesses do to limit the impact of these scandals? First, before a scandal hits, I think social businesses need to be candid about the fact that they are not perfect. Second, after the scandal, the social business needs to take responsibility and take significant corrective action beyond what is legally required. 

Patagonia’s founder does a really nice job of admitting the imperfection of his company and the struggles they face in his book The Responsible Company. Whole Foods supposedly offered somewhat above-market…

I recently learned, via e-mail, that Albany Law School has a number of open positions that may interest our readers. The positions, and links to the postings, are provided below:

Stephen Choi (NYU), Jill Fisch (Penn), Marcel Kahan (NYU), and Ed Rock (Penn) have posted an interesting new paper entitled Does Majority Voting Improve Board Accountability?

The authors report the dramatic increase in majority voting provisions. In 2006, only 16% of the S&P 500 companies used majority voting, but by January of 2014, over 90% of the S&P 500 companies had adopted some form of majority voting. (pg. 6). As of 2012, 52% of mid-cap companies and 19% of small-cap companies had adopted majority voting provisions. (pg. 7)

For the most part, the spread of majority voting has not led to significant reduction in election of nominated directors. In over 24,000 director nominations from 2007 to 2013, at companies with majority voting provisions, “only eight (0.033%) [nominees] failed to receive a majority of ‘for’ votes.” (pg.4)

The authors claim that their “most dramatic finding is”:

a substantial difference between early and later adopters of majority voting. The early adopters of majority voting appear to be more shareholder-responsive than other firms. These firms seem to have adopted majority voting voluntarily, and the adoption of majority voting has made little difference in shareholder-responsiveness going forward. By contrast, later adopters, as a group, seem

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Last week I blogged about the Yates Memorandum, in which the DOJ announced that any company that expected leniency in corporate deals would need to sacrfice a corporate executive for prosecution. VW has been unusually public in its mea culpas apologizing for its wrongdoing in its emission scandal this week. VW’s German CEO has resigned, the US CEO is expected to resign tomorrow, and other executives are expected to follow.

It will be interesting to see whether any VW executives will serve as the first test case under the new less kind, less gentle DOJ. Selfishly, I’m hoping for a juicy shareholder derivatives suit by the time I get to that chapter to share with my business associations students. That may not be too far fetched given the number of suits the company already faces.

This comes to us courtesy of Rachel Ezrol at Emory Law:

A Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative & Feminism and Legal Theory Workshop Project

A Workshop on Vulnerability at the Intersection of the Changing Firm and the Changing Family

When: October 16-17, 2015
Where: Emory University School of Law

 Registration is FREE for Emory students, faculty, and staff.

http://events.r20.constantcontact.com/register/event?oeidk=a07eb2ejk3i2e13daef&llr=7da4m4gab

From the Call for Papers:

Theories of dependency situate the limitations that attend the caregiving role in the construction of the relationship between work and family.  The “worker,” defined without reference to family responsibilities, becomes capable of autonomy, self-sufficiency, and responsibility through stable, full-time employment.  The privatized family, created by the union of spouses, is celebrated in terms of a self-sufficient ideal that addresses dependency within its own ranks, often through the gendered assumptions regarding responsibility for caretaking.   The feminist project has long critiqued these arrangements as they enshrine the inequality that follows as natural and inevitable and cloak the burdens of caretaking from examination or critique. The interpenetrations of the family and the firm have thus been understood as both multiple and wide-ranging. Both this system and the feminist critique of it, however, are associated with…

This post is related to another great post from Tom Rutledge at the Kentucky Business Entity Law Blog, Diversity Jurisdiction and Jurisdictional Discovery: The Third Circuit Holds That “Hiding The Ball” Will Not Work. Tom’s post is about Lincoln Benefit Life Company v. AEI Life, LLC, No. 14-2660, 2015 WL 5131423, ___ F.2d__ (3rd Cir. Sept. 2, 2015), which is available here. 

Lincoln Benefit allows a plaintiff, after a reasonable inquiry into the resources available (like court records and public documents), to allege complete diversity in good faith, if there is no reason to believe any LLC members share the same state of citizenship.  Thus, the diversity claim can be made on “information and belief.”  Tom explains that

While it may do nothing to address the fact that diversity jurisdiction may be unavailable consequent to de minimis indirect ownership  . . .  it does limit the ability of a defendant to “hide the ball” as to its citizenship while objecting that the other side has not adequately pled citizenship and therefore diversity. 

This concern arises out of the fact that LLCs, as unincorporated associations, are treated like partnerships for purposes of federal diversity jurisdiction, meaning that an…

For many businesses a good online reputation can significantly increase revenue.

Kashmir Hill, who I know from my time in NYC, has done some interesting reporting on businesses buying a good online reputation.

Earlier this week Kashmir posted the results of her undercover investigation into the problem of fake reviews, followers, and friends. When asking questions as a journalist, those selling online reviews insisted they only did real reviews on products they actually tested.

Kashmir then created a make-believe mobile karaoke business, Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express (a/k/a F.A.K.E), and found how easy it was to artificially inflate one’s online reputation. She writes:

For $5, I could get 200 Facebook fans, or 6,000 Twitter followers, or I could get @SMExpertsBiz to tweet about the truck to the account’s 26,000 Twitter fans. A Lincoln could get me a Facebook review, a Google review, an Amazon review, or, less easily, a Yelp review.

All of this for a fake business that the reviewers had, obviously, never frequented. Some of the purchased fake reviews were surprisingly specific. In a time when many of us rely on online reviews, at least in part, this was a sobering story. It was somewhat encouraging, however…

Last week I ventured a few blocks from Belmont’s campus to our neighbor Vanderbilt University Law School for their conference on The Future of International Corporate Governance. 

One of the many interesting papers presented was Independent Directors in Singapore: Puzzling Compliance Requiring Explanation by Dan Puchniak and Luh Luh Lan, both of the National University of Singapore.

The entire paper is worth reading, but I want to share three take-aways with our readers.

  1. “[O]nly a handful of jurisdictions [roughly 7%] have ever adopted the American concept of the independent director (i.e., where directors who are independent from management only— but not substantial shareholders—are deemed to be independent).” (pg. 6)

  2. Singapore adopted an American-style definition of “independent director” in 2001, which did not include independence from substantial shareholders. Despite this weaker definition of independence in a jurisdiction with much more concentrated shareholding than the U.S., Singapore enjoyed relative success through “functional substitutes” that limited the private benefits of control. According to the authors, these “functional substitutes” include social relationships in Family Controlled Firms (“FCFs”)” and legally imposed limits on the controlling government shareholder in Government Linked Companies (“GLCs”). 

  3. Despite relative success with the American-style definition of “independent director,” Singapore

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A while back, the CLS Blue Sky Blog  featured a post by Michael Peregrine on an article authored by Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice Leo Strine (Documenting The Deal: How Quality Control and Candor Can Improve Boardroom Decision-making and Reduce the Litigation Target Zone, 70 Bus. Law. 679 (2015)) offering pragmatic advice to corporate directors in deal-oriented decision making.  Michael’s post summarizes points made by Justice Strine in his article, including (of particular importance to legal counsel) those set forth below.

  • “Counsel can play an important role in assuring the engagement of the strongest possible independent financial advisor, and structuring the engagement to confirm the provision of the full breadth of deal-related financial advice to the board; not simply the delivery of a fairness opinion or similar document.”
  • “[I]n the M&A process, it is critical to be clear in the minutes themselves about what method is being used, and why.”
  • “Lawyers and governance support personnel should be particularly attentive to documenting in meeting minutes the advice provided by financial advisors about critical fairness considerations or other transaction terms, and the directors’ reaction to that advice.”
  • “[P]laintiffs’ lawyers are showing an increasing interest in seeking discovery of

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