The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation recently contained a notice about the Delaware Corporate Law Resource Center, which I thought might interest our readers as well. The post is reproduced below the line.

The oral histories of iconic Delaware cases are the most interesting, and useful, part of the website to me, though some of the cases do not appear to have materials yet. In addition to the cases, there is an oral history on 102(b)(7) to which my judge (VC Stephen Lamb) and others contributed. I hope the existing materials will be added to and expanded over time.  

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The University of Pennsylvania Law School Institute for Law and Economics (ILE) is pleased to announce the creation and public availability of a new website devoted to resources relating to the development of the Delaware General Corporation Law and related case law. This website (the Delaware Corporation Law Resource Center) has two principal components. The first is a compilation of resources relating to the Delaware General Corporation Law itself, including a link to the text of the statute, and links to the bills to amend the statute since its general revision in 1967. This portion of the website also includes links to annual commentaries on those amendments, the reports and minutes generated in the 1967 revision process, and memoranda disseminated by the Council of the Delaware State Bar Association Corporation Law Section describing some of the more significant and controversial amendments to the statute.

The second component of the website is a repository for materials constituting oral histories of iconic corporate law decisions of the Delaware courts since 1980, dealing with the director’s fiduciary duty of care, duties in takeovers, and freezeouts by controlling stockholders. This portion of the website is a work in progress, but for some of the cases it already contains the opinions in the case, briefs, selected transcripts of oral arguments, and selected key documents from the record. Most notably, the oral history compilation includes high quality videotaped interviews of lawyers and judges involved in the case, who describe the back story of the case with details not available through review of the courts’ opinions.

The oral history portion of the website also includes the first in a series of composite videos setting forth the background of each case. That premiere video describes the background of Smith v. Van Gorkom and presents, in narrative fashion, selected excerpts from the video interviews of the participants.

ILE hopes and expects that this website, which is freely available to the public, will prove to be a valuable resource for the teaching and development of Delaware corporate law. ILE welcomes suggestions for ways in which the website can be made even more useful to those interested in its subject.

The new website is available here.

If you’re a fan of wine (I am) and international business if of interest (it is), this Faculty Development might be for you.  It overlaps with the AALS Annual Meeting, so it won’t work for me this year, but it looks like a good program.  Have a look: 

Temple University’s Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) presents

Faculty Development in International Business: Santiago, Chile (January 5-11, 2018)

Business Innovation in Chile: A Case Study of the Wine Export Sector

Leave winter behind this January and join us for a summer experience in Chilean wine country. As an innovation-driven economy, the United States prides itself on developing and delivering innovative goods and services domestically and globally through high-tech exports, creative branding, and in-demand services. Among those exports is our growing wine sector, led by Napa Valley but recently expanding into other parts of California, Oregon, Virginia, and other lesser-known wine producing regions of the United States. Despite this expansion, the United States remains behind old world wine producers in Europe. Chile and Australia also outpace the United States in terms of wine exports and have been leading the way in innovative production and marketing techniques.

On this faculty/professional-oriented immersion experience, participants will visit a number of innovative businesses in the wine export sector and related industries in Chile to better understand how innovation in a highly-regulated sector can disrupt the traditional approaches taken by Old World producers in Europe and provide a comparative advantage for modern producers.

Some of the key learning outcomes on this immersion include:

  • An understanding of how innovation is utilized to drive growth in emerging markets;
  • A comparative perspective of an innovative sector active in the home and target market;
  • A better sense of the supply chain for a commodity such as wine and how innovation can accelerate movement along that supply chain and;
  • Tools that can be used to leverage enhancements in innovation for U.S. exporters.

The immersion experience is being led by Fox School of Business Assistant Professor, Dr. Kevin Fandl, a Latin America specialist with deep knowledge of the region. Dr. Fandl’s research emphasizes the relationship between law, policy, and business in global markets. He takes his extensive experience at senior levels of federal government policymaking to the marketplace by examining how laws and regulations drive or inhibit innovation and business opportunity. His knowledge of Chile, as well as the wine industry, add significant academic value to this immersion experience.

Program Fee: $2,700 per person (fee includes: hotel accommodations, corporate visits, cultural activities, some meals, visits to Chilean Vineyards, and in-country transportation)

Deposit:  A $500 non-refundable deposit is due at initial time of registration. Final payment will be due on October 27, 2017. To register: https://noncredit.temple.edu/templeciberfdib

Space is limited. A guest package is also available.

For questions or additional information, please contact Lauren Letko at lauren.letko@temple.edu

The following is a guest post from Bernard S. Sharfman*:

The foundation of my understanding of corporate governance rests on a small but growing number of essays, articles, and books.  These writings include Henry Manne’s Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control, Michael Dooley’s Two Models of Corporate Governance, Stephen Bainbridge’s Director Primacy: The Means and Ends of Corporate Governance and The Business Judgment Rule as Abstention Doctrine, Kenneth J. Arrow, The Limits of Organization, Frank H. Easterbrook & Daniel R. Fischel, The Economic Structure of Law, Zohar Goshen & Gideon Parchomovsky’s The Essential Role of Securities Regulation, and Alon Brav, Wei Jiang, Frank Partnoy & Randall Thomas’ Hedge Fund Activism, Corporate Governance, and Firm Performance.  Recently, I have added to this esteemed list Zohar Goshen and Richard Squire’s Principal Costs: A New Theory for Corporate Law and Governance.

Goshen and Squire put forth a new theory, the “principal-cost theory,” which posits that a firm’s optimal corporate governance arrangements result from a calculus that seeks to minimize total control costs, not just agency costs (“the economic losses resulting from managers’ natural incentive to advance their personal interests even when those interests conflict with the goal of maximizing their firm’s value”):

The theory states that each firm’s optimal governance structure minimizes total control costs, which are the sum of principal costs and agent costs. Principal costs occur when investors exercise control, and agent costs occur when managers exercise control. Both types of cost can be subdivided into competence costs, which arise from honest mistakes attributable to a lack of expertise, information, or talent, and conflict costs, which arise from the skewed incentives produced by the separation of ownership and control.  When investors exercise control, they make mistakes due to a lack of expertise, information, or talent, thereby generating principal competence costs. To avoid such costs, they delegate control to managers whom they expect will run the firm more competently. But delegation separates ownership from control, leading to agent conflict costs, and also to principal conflict costs to the extent that principals retain the power to hold managers accountable. Finally, managers themselves can make honest mistakes, generating agent competence costs. 

Moreover, it is important to understand that the theory is firm specific:

Principal costs and agent costs are substitutes for each other: Any reallocation of control rights between investors and managers decreases one type of cost but increases the other. The rate of substitution is firm specific, based on factors such as the firm’s business strategy, its industry, and the personal characteristics of its investors and managers. Therefore, each firm has a distinct division of control rights that minimizes total control costs. Because the cost-minimizing division varies by firm, the optimal governance structure does as well. The implication is that law’s proper role is to allow firms to select from a wide range of governance structures, rather than to mandate some structures and ban others. 

The bottom line is that “A firm that seeks to maximize total returns will weigh principal costs against agent costs when deciding how to divide control between managers and investors.”

A minimization of total control costs approach to the identification of optimal governance arrangements allows for the fundamental value of authority in large organizations to be respected and acknowledged, something which is missing in many academic works that only focus on agency costs.  According to Michael Dooley, “Where the residual claimants are not expected to run the firm and especially when they are many in number (thus increasing disparities in information and interests), their function becomes specialized to risk-bearing, thereby creating both the opportunity and necessity for managerial specialists.” According to Rose and Sharfman, “Especially where there are a large number of shareholders, it is much more efficient, in terms of maximizing shareholder value, for the Board and executive management—the corporate actors that possess overwhelming advantages in terms of information, including nonpublic information, and whose skills in the management of the company are honed by specialization in the management of this one company—to make corporate decisions rather than shareholders.”

The calculus of the principal-cost theory also allows for the potential for Bainbridge’s director primacy as a positive theory to be proven correct for any particular firm:  “As a positive theory of corporate governance, the director primacy model strongly emphasizes the role of fiat – i.e., the centralized decisionmaking authority possessed by the board of directors.” In the context of Goshen and Squire’s calculus, Bainbridge is arguing that principal costs will greatly outweigh agency costs when total control costs are minimized.  

Finally, Goshen and Squire’s theory allows for an understanding of why dual-class share structures continue to persist and why they have been successfully implemented at companies such as Alphabet (Google) and Facebook.  Their theory is critical to the argument I make in my most recent paper, A Private Ordering Defense of a Company’s Right to Use Dual Class Share Structures in IPOs.  In sum, Goshen and Squire’s theory allows for a more robust understanding of what is meant by optimal corporate governance arrangements, something that an exclusive focus on agency costs does not allow.     

*This post comes to us from Bernard S. Sharfman, who is an associate fellow at the R Street Institute, a member of the Journal of Corporation Law’s editorial advisory board, a visiting professor at the University of Maryland School of Law (Spring 2018), and a former visiting assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law (Spring 2013 and 2014).

The information below the line is from an e-mail I received about the SEALSB Conference. The SEALSB conference is the southeastern regional conference for law professors in business schools, but we have had practicing lawyers (especially those hoping to break into academia) and law school professors participate in the past.

The conference rotates locations in the southeast, and this year the conference will be held in Atlanta, GA from November 9-11. 

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SEALSB Conference 2017
 
The deadline to upload papers for inclusion in the conference materials has been extended to this Friday, October 20th. You may upload your paper by clicking on the following link: Paper Upload. Otherwise, please bring 25 copies to the meeting.
 
Friday, October 20th is also the conference registration deadline, so if you are planning to attend the conference but have not yet registered please make sure you do so sometime this week!
 
Additional information is available on the Conference Website. We look forward to seeing you at the Georgian Terrace!

My UT Law colleague Jonathan Rohr has coauthored (with Aaron Wright) an important piece of scholarship on an of-the-moment topic–financial instrument offerings using distributed ledger technology.  Even more fun?  He and his co-author are interested in aspects of this topic at its intersection with the regulation of securities offerings.  Totally cool.

Here is the extended abstract.  I cannot wait to dig into this one.  Can you?  As of the time I authored this post, the article already had almost 700 downloads . . . .  Join the crowd!

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Blockchain-Based Token Sales, Initial Coin Offerings, and the Democratization of Public Capital Markets

Jonathan Rohr & Aaron Wright

Best known for their role in the creation of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, blockchains are revolutionizing the way tech entrepreneurs are financing their business enterprises. In 2017 alone, over $2.2 billion has been raised through the sale of blockchain-based digital tokens in what some are calling initial coin offerings or “ICOs,” with some sales lasting mere seconds. In a token sale, organizers of a project sell digital tokens to members of the public to finance the development of future technology. An active secondary market for tokens has emerged, with tokens being bought and sold on cryptocurrency exchanges scattered across the globe, with often wild price fluctuations.

The recent explosion of token sales could mark the beginning of a broader shift in public capital markets—one similar to the shift in media distribution that started several decades ago. Blockchains drastically reduce the cost of exchanging value and enable anyone to transmit digitized assets around the globe in a highly trusted manner, stoking dreams of truly global capital markets that leverage the power of a blockchain and the Internet to facilitate capital formation.

The spectacular growth of tokens sales has caused some to argue that these sales simply serve as new tools for hucksters and unscrupulous charlatans to fleece consumers, raising the attention of regulators across the globe. A more careful analysis, however, reveals that blockchain-based tokens represent a wide variety of assets that take a variety of forms. Some are obvious investment vehicles and entitle their holders to economic rights like a share of any profits generated by the project. Others carry with them the right to use and govern the technology that is being developed with funds generated by the token sale and may represent the beginning of a new way to build and fund powerful technological platforms.

Lacking homogeneity, the status of tokens under U.S. securities laws is anything but clear. The test under which security status is assessed—the Howey test—has uncertain application to blockchain-based tokens, particularly those that entitle the holder to use a particular technological service, because they also present the possibility of making a profit by selling the token on a secondary market. Although the SEC recently issued a Report of Investigation in which it found that one type of token qualified as a security, confusion surrounds the boundaries between the types of tokens that will be deemed securities and those that will not.

Blockchain-based tokens exhibit disparate features and have characteristics that make current registration exemptions a poor fit for token sales. In addition to including requirements that do not fit squarely with blockchain-based systems, the transfer restrictions that apply to the most popular exemptions would have the perverse effect of restricting the ability of U.S. consumers to access a new generation of digital technology. The result is an uncertain regulatory environment in which token sellers do not have a sensible path to compliance.

In this Article, we argue that the SEC and Congress should provide token sellers and the exchanges that facilitate token sales with additional certainty. Specifically, we propose that the SEC provide guidance on how it will apply the Howey test to digital tokens, particularly those that mix aspects of consumption and use with the potential for a profit. We also propose that lawmakers adopt both a compliance-driven safe harbor for online exchanges that list tokens with a reasonable belief that the public sale of such tokens is not a violation of Section 5 as well as an exemption to the Section 5 registration requirement that has been tailored to digital tokens.

We’ve talked about Uber and its tribulations a few times here at BLPB, including what I feel is one of the remarkable aspects of the saga – the fact that a private company is being treated as public in the general imagination.

In keeping with that theme, Renee Jones just posted The Unicorn Governance Trap to SSRN, with the basic thesis that Uber and companies like it (Theranos, Zenefits, etc) are experiencing governance pathologies precisely because they inhabit a hybrid space between public and private.  (George Georgiev made an abbreviated version of the same argument in a column for The Hill several months ago.)  Jones contends that these unicorn companies feature the separation of ownership and control typical of a public company, but they are not subject to the same disciplining mechanisms from investors of voice (due to dual-class shares), exit (due to the limits on liquidity inherent in private status), and litigation (due to lack of public reporting obligations, and potential securities fraud claims – though on that last point, but see Theranos and Uber litigation).  She distinguishes private companies that grew large in an earlier era, where ownership and control are unified (typically, family-owned businesses).  She also points out – though she is not the first – that efforts to increase the number of IPOs by limiting regulatory burdens as the Trump Administration would like to do are misguided; IPOs have likely declined because companies do not need them if they can raise capital privately.

To be sure, there are limits to how far the argument can be taken (Exs. A , B, and C.)  And the problems at unicorns may have less to do with securities regulation than with the current fashion for treating founders like auteurs.  Still, it does seem like the relatively new ability for companies to raise massive amounts of capital without the discipline of the broader markets encourages a degree of corporate governance laxity. 

If that’s right, then it represents a real-time demonstration of the importance of corporate governance for the broader society.   Typically, corporate governance is treated as “private law,” a function of private contracting among investors and managers.  Corporate governance principles are designed to protect investors from exploitation, but do not usually take protection of other stakeholders as part of their central mandate.  This is, after all, the ideological basis of the internal affairs doctrine.  Scott Hirst recently argued that investors should choose the extent to which companies are subject to federal securities regulation, explicitly adopting the position that only corporate governance externalities – and not other kinds of social welfare externalities – are part of the calculus.

But now we can see that, whether by design or happy accident, obligations placed on firms ostensibly for the protection of investors have very tangible effects on employees, customers, competitors, and general compliance with the rule of law.  It is not clear that external regulation alone can carry this responsibility, because the whole point is that certain managers/controllers may be undeterrable, or only deterrable at significant cost.  They can be contained only via constraints on their power to act in the first place, and that’s where corporate governance comes in.

In sum, as I tell my students on day one, corporate law is about the regulation of power. 

Earlier this week, my two-year old daughter was in the pediatric ICU with a virus that attacked her lungs. We spent two nights at The Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt (“Vanderbilt Children’s). Thankfully, she was released Wednesday afternoon and is doing well. Unfortunately, many of the children on her floor had been in the hospital for weeks or months and were not afforded such a quick recovery. There cannot be many places more sad than the pediatric ICU.

Since returning home, I confirmed that Vanderbilt Children’s is a nonprofit organization, as I suspected. I do wonder whether the hospital would be operated the same if it were a benefit corporation or as a traditional corporation.

Some of the decisions made at the hospital seems like they would have been indefensible from a shareholder perspective, if the hospital had been for-profit. Vanderbilt Children’s has a captive market, with no serious competitors that I know of in the immediate area. Yet, the hospital doesn’t charge for parking. If they did, I don’t think it would impact anyone’s decision to choose them because, again, there aren’t really other options, and the care is the important part anyway. The food court was pretty reasonably priced, and they probably could have charged double without seriously impacting demand; the people at the hospital valued time with their children more than a few dollars. The hospital was beautifully decorated with art aimed at children – for example, with a big duck on the elevator ceiling, which my daughter absolutely loved. There were stars on the ceiling of the hospital rooms, cartoons on TVs in every room, etc. All of this presumably cost more than a drab room, and perhaps it was all donated, but assuming it actually cost more, I am not sure those things would result in any financial return on investment.

As we have discussed many times on this blog, even in the traditional for-profit setting, the business judgment rule likely protects the decisions of the board of directors, even if the promised ROI seems poor. But at what point – especially when the board knows there will be no return on the investment at all – is it waste? (Note: Question sparked by a discussion that Stefan Padfied, Josh Fershee, and I had in Knoxville after a session at the UTK business law conference this year). And, in any event, the Dodge and eBay cases may lead to some doubt in the way a case may play out. And even if the law is highly unlikely to enforce shareholder wealth maximization, the norm in traditional for-profit corporations may lead to directorial decisions that we find problematic as a society, especially in a hospital setting.

Now, maybe the Hippocratic Oath, community expectations, and various regulations make it so nonprofit and forprofit hospitals operate similarly. As a father of a patient, however, even as a free market inclined professor, I would prefer hospitals to be nonprofit and clearly focused on care first. Also, some forprofit hospitals are supposedly considering going the benefit corporation route, which may be a step in the right direction – at least they have an obligation to consider various stakeholders (even if, currently, the statutory enforcement mechanisms are extremely weak) and at least there are some reporting requirements (even if , currently, reporting compliance is miserable low in the states I have examined and the statutory language is painfully vague).

I am not sure I have ever been in a situation where I would have paid everything I had, and had no other good options for the immediate need, and yet I still did not feel taken advantage of by the organization. There is much more that could be said on these issues, but I do wonder whether organizational form was important here. And, if so, what is the solution? Require hospitals to be nonprofits (or at least benefit corporations, if those statutes were amended to add more teeth)?