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Yesterday, I listened to How I Built This‘ podcast on Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Yogurt.

I assume most readers are familiar with Stonyfield Yogurt, and perhaps a bit of its story, but I think the podcast goes far beyond what is generally known. 

The main thing that stuck out in the podcast was how many struggles Stonyfield faced. Most of the companies featured on How I Built This struggle for a few months or even a few years, but Stonyfield seemed to face more than its share of challenges for well over a decade. The yogurt seemed pretty popular early on, but production, distribution, and cash flow problems haunted them. Stonyfield also had a tough time sticking with their organic commitment, abandoning organic for a few years when they outsourced production and couldn’t convince the farmers to follow their practices. With friends and family members’ patient investing (including Gary’s mother and mother-in-law), Stonyfield finally found financial success after raising money for its own production facility, readopting organic, and finding broader distribution.

After about 20 years, Stonyfield sold the vast majority of the company to large multinational Group Danone. Gary explained that some investors were looking for liquidity and…

No one had a National Compliance Officer Day when I was in the job, but now it’s an official thing courtesy of SAI Global, a compliance consulting company. The mission of this one-year old holiday is to:

  • Raise awareness about the importance of ethics and compliance in business and shine a spotlight on the people responsible for making it a reality.
  • Provide resources to promote the wellness and well-being of ethics and compliance professionals so they can learn how to overcome stress and burnout.
  • Grow the existing ethics and compliance community and help identify and guide the next generation of E&C advocates.

Although some may look at this skeptically as a marketing ploy, I’m all for this made-up holiday given what compliance officers have to deal with today.

Last Saturday, I spoke at the Business Law Professor Blog Conference at the University of Tennessee about corporate governance, compliance, and social responsibility in the Trump/Pence era. During my presentation, I described the ideal audit committee meeting for a company that takes enterprise risk management seriously. My board agenda included: the impact of climate change and how voluntary and mandatory disclosures could change under the current EPA and SEC leadership; compliance…

Business leaders probably didn’t think the honeymoon would be over so fast. A CEO as President, a deregulation czar, billionaires in the cabinet- what could possibly go wrong?

When Ken Frazier, CEO of Merck, resigned from one of the President’s business advisory councils because he didn’t believe that President Trump had responded appropriately to the tragic events in Charlottesville, I really didn’t think it would have much of an impact. I had originally planned to blog about How (Not) To Teach a Class on Startups, and I will next week (unless there is other breaking news). But yesterday, I decided to blog about Frazier, and to connect his actions to a talk I gave to UM law students at orientation last week about how CEOs talk about corporate responsibility but it doesn’t always make a difference. I started drafting this post questioning how many people would actually run to their doctors asking to switch their medications to or from Merck products because of Frazier’s stance on Charlottesville. Then I thought perhaps, Frazier’s stance would have a bigger impact on the millennial employees who will make up almost 50% of the employee base in the next few years. Maybe he would…

My latest paper, The Inclusive Capitalism Shareholder Proposal, 17 U.C. Davis Bus. L.J. 147 (2017), is now available on Westlaw. Here is the abstract:

When it comes to the long-term well being of our society, it is difficult to overstate the importance of addressing poverty and economic inequality. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty famously argued that growing economic inequality is inherent in capitalist systems because the return to capital inevitably exceeds the national growth rate. Proponents of “Inclusive Capitalism” can be understood to respond to this issue by advocating for broadening the distribution of the acquisition of capital with the earnings of capital. This paper advances the relevant discussion by explaining how shareholder proposals may be used to increase understanding of Inclusive Capitalism, and thereby further the likelihood that Inclusive Capitalism will be implemented. In addition, even if the suggested proposals are rejected, the shareholder proposal process can be expected to facilitate a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of Inclusive Capitalism, as well as foster useful new lines of communication for addressing both poverty and economic inequality.

Good morning from gorgeous Belize. I hope to see some of you this weekend at SEALS. A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the compliance course I recently taught. I received quite a few emails asking for my syllabus and teaching materials. I am still in the middle of grading but I thought I would provide some general advice for those who are considering teaching a similar course. I taught thinking about the priorities of current employers and the skills our students need.

1) Picking materials is hard– It’s actually harder if you have actually worked in compliance, as I have, and still consult, as I do from time to time. I have all of the current compliance textbooks but didn’t find any that suited my needs. Shameless plug- I’m co-authoring a compliance textbook to help fill the gap. I wanted my students to have the experience they would have if they were working in-house and had to work with real documents.  I found myself either using or getting ideas from many primary source materials from the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics, the  Institute of Privacy Professionals, DLA Piper, the Federal Sentencing Guidelines for…

My colleague, Joan Heminway, yesterday posted Democratic Norms and the Corporation: The Core Notion of Accountability. She raises some interesting points (as usual), and she argues: “In my view, more work can be done in corporate legal scholarship to push on the importance of accountability as a corporate norm and explore further analogies between political accountability and corporate accountability.”

I have not done a lot of reading in this area, but I am inclined to agree that it seems like an area that warrants more discussion and research.  The post opens with some thought-provoking writing by Daniel Greenwood, including this:  

Most fundamentally, corporate law and our major business corporations treat the people most analogous to the governed, those most concerned with corporate decisions, as mere helots. Employees in the American corporate law system have no political rights at all—not only no vote, but not even virtual representation in the boardroom legislature.
Joan correctly observes, “Whether you agree with Daniel or not on the substance, his views are transparent and his belief and energy are palpable.” Although I admit I have not spent a lot of time with his writing, but my initial take is that I do not

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WB

I highly recommend Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry. 

Set in rural Kentucky, Jayber Crow is a story about small town life, community, love/hate, sustainability, and industrialization. The main character, Jonah “Jayber” Crow loses both his parents and his Aunt and Uncle by the age of ten. He spends the next few years in an orphanage before obtaining a scholarship to a local college as a “pre-ministerial” student. Doubting his calling to the ministry, Jayber drops out and returns to his hometown. He serves as the town’s only barber, and he also picks up jobs as the local grave digger and church janitor. Jayber narrates, in vivid detail, the exodus from the small town by the younger generation and the invasion of large-scale, profit-focused, corporate farming.   

The author, Wendell Berry, warns that “persons attempting to explain, interpret, explicate, analyze, deconstruct, or otherwise ‘understand’ [this book] will be exiled to a desert island in the company only of other explainers” so I will simply end with a few of my favorite quotes below. I think one of the reasons I so liked this book is because it reminded me of my family’s property and of my maternal grandfather, who lived at a pace unknown…

Prior to joining academia, I served as a compliance officer, deputy GC, and chief privacy officer for a Fortune 500 company. I had to learn everything on the job by attending webinars and conferences and reading client alerts. Back then, I would have paid a law school graduate a competitive salary to work in my compliance group, but I couldn’t find anyone who had any idea about what the field entailed.

The world has changed. Now many schools (including mine) offer relevant coursework for this JD-advantage position. I just finished teaching a summer skills course in compliance and corporate social responsibility, and I’m hoping that I have encouraged at least a few of the students to consider it as a viable career path. Compliance is one of the fastest growing corporate positions in the country, and the number of compliance personnel has doubled in the past 6 years. Still, many business-minded law students don’t consider it in the same vein as they consider jobs with Big Law.

This summer, my twelve students met twice a week for two hours at 7:30 pm. In the compressed six-week course, they did the following:

  • Heard from compliance officers and outside counsel for public

…

Yesterday, during a conversation with a law student about whether corporate social responsibility is a mere marketing ploy to fool consumers, the student described her conflict with using Uber. She didn’t like what she had read in the news about Uber’s workplace culture issues, sex harassment allegations, legal battles with its drivers, and leadership vacuum. The student, who is studying for the bar, probably didn’t even know that the company had even more PR nightmares just over the past ten days— the termination of twenty employees after a harassment investigation; the departure of a number of executives including the CEO’s right hand man; the CEO’s “indefinite” leave of absence to “mourn his mother” following a scathing investigative report by former Attorney General Eric Holder; and the resignation of a board member who made a sexist remark during a board meeting (ironically) about sexism at Uber. She clearly hadn’t read Ann Lipton’s excellent post on Uber on June 17th.

Around 1:00 am EST, the company announced that the CEO had resigned after five of the largest investors in the $70 billion company issued a memo entitled “Moving Uber Forward.” The memo was not available as…

The list is here:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/topten/topTenResults.cfm?groupingId=1566963&netorjrnl=ntwk

The paper can be downloaded here:  https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2957820

A portion of the abstract:

[T]his Essay and my other works introduce a new theory of the firm, collaboration theory. This theory views the corporation as a collaborative effort among a state government and those individuals organizing, operating, and owning the business entity to pursue economic development and economic gain. This theory is superior to the prevailing essentialist theories of the corporation because it explains both how and why the corporation exists.

Under this theory, corporations are obligated to seek profit based on the deal struck among the state and individuals owning, operating, and organizing the corporation, but the co-adventurers in the corporation are obligated to treat each other in good faith whenever possible. This means corporations should only engage in socially irresponsible ways in which the financial benefit to the corporation is clear. Because of the uncertainty of life, this is only going to be the rarest of circumstances. In these rare circumstances, to control bad behavior on the part of the corporation, the government must engage in affirmative lawmaking and regulation to alter the cost–benefit analysis to force corporations to be ethical.