Corporations

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Last week, I blogged blogged about lawsuits against chocolate makers alleging unfair and deceptive trade practices for failure to disclose that the companies may have used child slaves to harvest their products. Today, I want to discuss steps that the Business Law Section of the American Bar Association is taking to provide more transparency in supply chain practices.

In 2014, the ABA House of Delegates adopted Model Principles on Labor Trafficking and Child Labor developed by over 50 judges, in-house counsel, outside counsel, academics, and NGOs. The Model Principles address the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and other hard and soft law regimes. At last week’s ABA Business Law Spring Meeting, academics David Snyder and Jennifer Martin presented on human rights issues in supply chains alongside practicing lawyers and in-house executives. Many of them (and several others) had formed a Working Group to Draft Human Rights Protections in Supply Contracts. The Group aims to provide contract clauses that are “legally effective” and “operationally likely.”

As a former Deputy GC for a supply chain management company, I can attest that the ABA’s focus is timely as companies answer questions from customers, regulators, shareholders, and other stakeholders. Human rights…

Oh boy. A 2010 case just came through on my “limited liability corporation” WESTLAW alert (that I get every day).  This one is a mess. Recall that LLCs are limited liability companies, which are a separate entity from partnership and corporations, despite often having some similar characteristics to each of those. 

CBOE, along with the six other exchanges, has an interest in OPRA but OPRA was not incorporated as a separate legal entity until January 1, 2010, when it incorporated as a limited liability corporation. Id. (describing the restructuring of OPRA following its incorporation). At the time this lawsuit was filed, however, there remains a question as to whether there were any formalities in place to separate OPRA from CBOE operations. In short, the parties dispute whether, at the time the suit was filed, OPRA operated independently or was operated jointly with CBOE.
*2 To this end, Realtime asserts that the lack of any corporate governance at OPRA [an LLC], such as Articles of Association or a partnership agreement, renders OPRA “simply a label with no formal business structure.” RESPONSE at 2, 4 (citing SEC RELEASE at 2) (“OPRA was not organized as an association pursuant to Articles of

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Greetings from the ABA Business Law Meeting in sunny Orlando, Florida. Today, I attended an excellent program on Protecting Human Rights in Supply Chains; Moving from Policy to Action. I plan to blog more about the meeting next week, highlighting the work surrounding draft human rights clauses for supplier contracts. The project was spearheaded by David Snyder of American University and corporate lawyer Susan Maslow. In this post, I want to address one of the topics Susan Maslow discussed– the recent spate of lawsuits brought by consumers who allege unfair trade practices based on what companies say (or don’t say) about their human rights records.

I’ve blogged (incessantly for the past five years) and written longer articles about the various ESG disclosure regimes. I’ve argued that in theory, disclosure is a good thing. But without meaningful financial penalties from regulators for violations, many corporations won’t do anything more than the bare minimum for human rights, even with the threat of (often short-lived) consumer boycotts. Further, most consumers suffer from disclosure overload or don’t understand or remember what they read.

The disclosure issue has now reached the courts. In 2015, a law firm filed cases in California under unfair competition and…

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.

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…

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…

Within the past 24 hours, I’ve seen at least three news article that led me to reflect on my past blog posts. Rather than write a full post on each article, I’ve decided to note some observations.

The Tweet That Launched A Boycott (And Maybe a Buycott)

I’ve been skeptical in the past about whether boycotts work.  Perhaps times are changing. This week, Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg tweeted that advertisers on Laura Ingraham’s cable show should pull out after she tweeted,  “David Hogg Rejected By Four Colleges To Which He Applied and whines about it. (Dinged by UCLA with a 4.1 GPA…totally predictable given acceptance rates.) https://www.dailywire.com/news/28770/gun-rights-provocateur-david-hogg-rejected-four-joseph-curl …”  On March 28th, the 17-year old activist responded with “Soooo what are your biggest advertisers … Asking for a friend. .” He then provided a list of her top twelve sponsors.

As of 8:00 p.m. tonight, the following companies dumped the Fox show, eleven after the talk show host had apologized, stating “On reflection, in the spirit of Holy Week, I apologize for any upset or hurt my tweet caused him or any of the brave victims of Parkland… For the record, I believe my…

I am committed to introducing my business law students to business law doctrine and policy both domestically and internationally.  The Business Associations text that I coauthored has comparative legal observations in most chapters.  I have taught Cross-Border Mergers & Acquisitions with a group of colleagues and will soon be publishing a book we have coauthored.  And I taught comparative business law courses for four years in study abroad programs in Brazil and the UK.  

In the study abroad programs, I struggled in finding suitable texts, cobbling together several relatively small paperbacks and adding some web-available materials.  The result was suboptimal.  I yearned for a single suitable text.  In my view, texts for study abroad courses should be paperback and cover all of the basics in the field in a succinct fashion, allowing for easy portability and both healthy discussion to fill gaps and customization, as needed, to suit the instructor’s teaching and learning objectives.

And so it was with some excitement–but also some healthy natural skepticism–that I requested a review copy of Corporations: A Comparative Perspective (International Edition), coauthored by my long-time friend Marco Ventoruzzo (Bocconi and Penn State) and five others (all scholars from outside…

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 …

My goodness. In a recent case, a Massachusetts court deals with issues related to Bling Entertainment, LLC, which is, as you would expect, a limited liability company.  It is NOT a partnership (as the court correctly notes), but …

Yiming alleges Bling Defendants—as “managers, controlling members, and fellow members of Bling”—owed a duty of utmost good faith and loyalty to Yiming that they breached through their actions of fraud, self-dealing, embezzlement, and mismanagement. D. 16 ¶¶ 70-71. “It is well settled that partners owe each other a fiduciary duty of the utmost good faith and loyalty.” Karter v. Pleasant View Gardens, Inc., No. 16-11080-RWZ, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 50462, at *13 (D. Mass. Mar. 31, 2017) (quoting Meehan v. Shaughnessy, 404 Mass. 419, 433 (1989)). Bling is not a partnership, however, but is rather a limited liability corporation. D. 16 ¶ 10.
YIMING WANG, Plaintiff, v. XINYI LIU, YUANLONG HUANG, ZHAONAN WANG, BLING ENTERTAINMENT, LLC, SHENGXI TINA TIAN & MT LAW, LLC, Defendants., No. 16-CV-12581, 2018 WL 1320704, at *6 (D. Mass. Mar. 13, 2018).
 
Negative. Well, the first part is right.  Bling is an LLC, not a partnership. But it is not a corporation.

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