Corporations

Subscribe to Corporations via RSS

I had originally planned to post Pt. 2 of the blog post I did a couple of weeks ago, but this announcement is time sensitive.

I’m thrilled to announce that the Transactional Skills Program at the University of Miami School of Law is partnering with Laura Frederick for the second How to Contract conference. It’s time sensitive because we are considering holding a side event with a contract drafting and negotiation competition for law students if there’s enough interest. If you think you would be interested, please email me at mweldon@law.miami.edu.

For lawyers, there are virtual and live options for the contract conference. I’ve cut and pasted from the website so you can see why you should come to sunny Miami (and it won’t be hurricane season):

It is not about the mega deals.

ContractsCon is about the contracts you work on EVERY DAY. We want to help you learn how to draft and negotiate the deals you see all the time.

Because for every 100-page specialized contract sent to outside counsel, there are thousands of smaller but important ones that in-house counsel and professionals do day in and day out.

ContractsCon focuses on how we manage risk and make the tough decisions with less …

When I teach business law and corporations, I teach that a corporation’s “board of directors has full control over the affairs of the corporation.”  If a dispute breaks out between the CEO of a corporation and the board of directors, the board’s view controls because the board is ultimately in charge of the corporation’s affairs.  Of course, there may be room for questioning whether a valid board meeting occurred or the composition of the board for some reason, but the basic point that the board of directors gets to make these decisions struck me as largely settled law.

But you never know exactly what courts will do when a dispute ends up before them.  This brings me to the governance dispute that broke out at Vinco Ventures, Inc. (NASDAQ: BBIG).  According to its most recent 10-K, Vinco’s business involved “digital media and content technologies.”  As of April, “[f]ive directors comprise[d] [Vinco’s] board of directors: Lisa King, Roderick Vanderbilt, Elliot Goldstein, Michael J. DiStasio and Philip A. McFillin.”  King served as the CEO and Vanderbilt served as chair of the board.  An 8-K filed on July 8th, stated that Theodore Farnsworth was appointed as co-CEO and made a member…

You can’t read the business press without seeing some handwringing about ESG. It’s probably why I’ve been teaching, advising, and sitting on a lot more panels about the topic lately. Like it or not, it’s here to stay (at least for now) so I decided to do a completely unscientific experiment on lawyer and law student perceptions of ESG using a class simulation. Over the past three months, I’ve used the topic of tech companies and human rights obligations to demonstrate how the “S” factor plays out in real life. I used the same simulation for foreign lawyers in UM’s US Law in Action program, college students who participated in UM’s Summer Legal Academy, Latin American lawyers studying US Business Entities, and my own law students in my Regulatory Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability class at the University of Miami.

Prior to the simulation, I required the students to watch The Social Dilemma,  the Netflix documentary about the potentially dangerous effects of social media on individuals and society at large. I also lectured on the shareholder v. stakeholder debate; the role of investors, consumers, NGOs, and governments in shaping the debate about ESG; and the basics…

Another semester teaching business associations law is just around the corner. In fact, our fall semester begins next week.  This post is dedicated to those who, like me, are prepping for and teaching that course this semester.

I was invited to participate in a discussion group entitled “Pressure on and Backlash against Corporations as Political Actors” at the 2022 Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) annual conference last week.  The description for the session is as follows:

When businesses wade into political issues like abortion, the environment, gun control, LGBTQ rights, Black Lives Matter, and international affairs, they potentially face consumer backlash and even governmental retribution. Remaining silent can also be risky, potentially upsetting other consumers and employees. And silence/inaction is not always an option: either a business remains in Russia after its invasion into Ukraine or closes its operations there, sometimes at considerable expense. This discussion group will analyze these issues from corporate, tax, policy, electoral, and constitutional law perspectives. Should businesses like Nike, McDonalds, Disney, and Ben & Jerry’s take political stances, stay out of politics altogether, focus on profits or something broader, and what are the practical and legal ramifications of these views? More broadly, what is…

Millions of law school graduates around the US just took the bar exam. Others are preparing to enter colleges and graduates schools in a few weeks. How will these respective groups do? While a lot depends on how much and how well they study, a large part of their success or failure may depend on how they’ve been taught. I recently posted about how adults learn and what the research says we should do differently. In this post, I’ll show how I used some of the best practices in the last ten days when I taught forty foreign lawyers from around the world  and thirty college students in separate summer courses offered by the University of Miami as well as nine Latin American lawyers who were taking courses in business law from a Panamanian school. I taught these disparate groups about ESG, disclosures, and human rights. With each of the cohorts, I conducted a simulation where I divided them into groups to prioritize issues based on whether they were a CEO, an investor, a consumer, the head of an NGO, and for the US college students, I added the roles of a member of Congress or influencer. In a…

Courtesy of friend-of-the-BLPB Bernie Sharfman, I am linking to his coauthored (with James Copland) comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on the climate change rule-making proposal.  The letter includes copious footnotes.  As with other comment letters that have been written on the substance of the SEC proposal, there are some interesting definitional questions on which intelligent folks disagree.  E.g., what is included under the umbrella of investor protection?  What regulation promotes “efficiency, competition, and capital formation”?  These all are among the big picture issues on which the SEC has the opportunity to speak.  I expect thoughtful responses.

NBLS2022(OULawPhoto)

Having just come back from the first in-person National Business Law Scholars Conference since 2019 (at The University of Oklahoma College of Law, pictured here), I have many thoughts swirling through my head.  I always love that conference.  The people, whom I dearly missed, are a big part of that. And Megan Wischmeier Shaner was an awesome planning committee host. But the ideas that were shared . . . .  Wow. So many great research projects were shared by these wonderful law teachers and scholars!  Over time, I hope to share many of them with you.  

But for today, I want to focus on one thing that I heard in a few presentations at the conference: that the shareholder wealth maximization norm is and always has been the be-all and end-all of corporate purpose and board decision making. I am posting on that topic today not only because of my engagement with the conference, but also because the issue is implicated in Ann’s post on Saturday (Bathrooms are About Stakeholders) and by Stefan’s post yesterday (ESG & Communism?). I want to focus on a part of Stefan’s post (and Stefan, you may that issue with…

Prior to joining academia, I served as a compliance officer for a Fortune 500 company and I continue to consult on compliance matters today. It’s an ever changing field, which is why I’m glad so many students take my Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability course in the Fall. I tell them that if they do transactional or commercial litigation work, compliance issues will inevitably arise. Here are some examples: 

  • In M&A deals, someone must look at the target’s  bribery, money laundering, privacy, employment law, environmental, and other risks
  • Companies have to complete several disclosures. How do you navigate the rules that conflict or overlap?
  • What do institutional investors really care about? What’s material when it relates to ESG issues?
  • What training does the board need to ensure that they meet their fiduciary duties?
  • How do you deal with cyberattacks and what are the legal and ethical issues related to paying ransomware?
  • How do geopolitical factors affect the compliance program?
  • Who can be liable for a compliance failure?
  • What happens when people cut corners in a supply chain and how can that affect the company’s legal risk?
  • What does a Biden DOJ/SEC mean compared to the same offices under Trump?
  • Who

…

It’s a lovely Friday night for grading papers for my Business and Human Rights course where we focused on ESG, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. My students met with in-house counsel, academics, and a consultant to institutional investors; held mock board meetings; heard directly from people who influenced the official drafts of EU’s mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence directive  and the ABA’s Model Contract Clauses for Human Rights; and conducted simulations (including acting as former Congolese rebels and staffers for Mitch McConnell during a conflict minerals exercise). Although I don’t expect them all to specialize in this area of the law, I’m thrilled that they took the course so seriously, especially now with the Biden Administration rewriting its National Action Plan on Responsible Business Conduct with public comments due at the end of this month.

The papers at the top of my stack right now:

  1. Apple: The Latest Iphone’s Camera Fails to Zoom Into the Company’s Labor Exploitation
  2. TikTok Knows More About Your Child Than You Do: TikTok’s Violations of Children’s Human Right to Privacy in their Data and Personal Information
  3. Redraft of the Nestle

…

I’m doing what may seem crazy to some- teaching Business Associations to 1Ls. I have a group of 65 motivated students who have an interest in business and voluntarily chose to take the hardest possible elective with one of the hardest possible professors. But wait, there’s more. I’m cramming a 4-credit class into 3 credits. These students, some of whom are  learning the rule against perpetuities in Property and the battle of the forms in Contracts while learning the business judgment rule, are clearly masochists. 

If you’re a professor or a student, you’re coming close to the end of the semester and you’re trying to cram everything in. Enter Elon Musk. 

I told them to just skim Basic v. Levenson and instead we used Rasella v. Musk, the case brought by investors claiming fraud on the market. Coincidentally, my students were already reading In Re Tesla Motors, Inc. Stockholder Litigation because it was in their textbook to illustrate the concept of a controlling shareholder. Elon’s pursuit of Twitter allowed me to use that company’s 2022 proxy statement and ask them why Twitter would choose to be “for” a proposal to declassify its board, given all that’s going on. Perhaps…