Robert Esposito (Drinker Biddle) passed along his firm’s interesting report on early crowdfunding offerings. The report is available here. Be sure to download the firm level detail spreadsheet available via the data download on the top right of the page.  

The report shows that social enterprise and breweries/distilleries account for outsized portions of the early offerings. A group of us (including co-blogger Joan Heminway) predicted, at the University of Colorado’s business school in July 2013, that social entrepreneurs would gravitate to equity crowdfunding. Separately, in my social enterprise law seminar, I was surprised by how many students presented on breweries that were social enterprises, and looking at this list it appears that there is at least one company (Hawaiian Ola Brewing Corporation – a Certified B Corporation) that falls into both the social enterprise and brewery categories highlighted below. It may be that both areas appeal to younger entrepreneurs who may also be eager to try this new form of capital raising. 

Go read the entire report, but I provide a teaser quote below the dotted line with some emphasis added.

——————–

In general. As of June 30, 2016, 50 companies have filed a Form C with the SEC to offer securities under the Regulation Crowdfunding exemption. Minimum target offering amounts range from $20,000 to $500,000 per offering, with a median of $55,000. All but one of these issuers, however, have disclosed that they will accept offers in excess of the target amount, including 27 issuers that say they will accept investments at or near the maximum permitted offering amount of $1,000,000.  In contrast, 18 of the first 50 issuers elected to cap their offering at just $100,000, with the remainder setting an offering cap of between $200,000 and $500,000.  In the aggregate, if this first wave of retail crowdfundings is successful, 50 small companies will raise an aggregate of $6 to $30 million in new capital to fund their businesses. 

While announced offering durations range from 21 days to one year, the median period that issuers say they will keep their offerings open is just under six months, with about half electing an offering duration between 166 and 182 days.

Eighteen different jurisdictions of incorporation are represented among the first 50 issuers; however, nearly half of the initial filers (24) are Delaware entities. Early data shows that issuers tend to be early-stage startups, with a median issuer age of just 354 days. Nevertheless, nine of the issuers were more than five years old, and the oldest was incorporated in 2003. . . . 

While a total of 12 funding portals have registered with FINRA to date, the early mover Wefunder portal hosts more than half (26) of the first 50 offerings. The StartEngine portal has secured eight offerings, with the remainder split among other portals, including SeedInvest, Next Seed, Flashfunders, and Venture.co. 

Early Adopters.

  • Social Enterprises. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Special Topic Report on Social Entrepreneurship, social enterprises account for only 5.7 percent of entrepreneurial activity in the United States. However, early crowdfunding data shows that social enterprises are strongly represented among crowdfunding issuers. Seven issuers, representing 14 percent of the first 50 offerings, are either registered as benefit corporations or benefit LLCs, or are certified by B Lab as B Corps, and at least an additional nine issuers operate within traditional corporate forms with strong social and/or environmental missions. Combined, these issuers represent 32 percent of the first 50 offerings.
     
  • Raise a Glass. Craft breweries, distilleries, and licensed establishments are also disproportionately represented among the first 50 issuers. Eight issuers, representing 16 percent of the first 50 offerings, fall into this category, including 2 distilleries, 2 craft breweries, 2 bars, as well as a frozen alcohol producer and a producer of ginger liqueur. 

Two weeks ago, I blogged about the potential unintended consequences of (1) Dodd-Frank whistleblower awards to compliance officers and in-house counsel and (2) the Department of Justice’s Yates Memo, which requires companies to turn over individuals (even before they have determined they are legally culpable) in order to get any cooperation credit from the government.

Today at the International Legal Ethics Conference, I spoke about the intersection of state ethics laws, common law fiduciary duties, SOX §307 and §806, and the potential erosion of the attorney-client relationship. I posed the following questions regarding lawyer/whistleblowers and the Yates Memo at the end of my talk:

  • How will this affect Upjohn warnings? (These are the corporate Miranda warnings and were hard enough for me to administer without me having to tell the employee that I might have to turn them over to the government after our conversation)
  • Will corporate employees ask for their own counsel during investigations or plead the 5th since they now run a real risk of being criminally and civilly prosecuted by DOJ?
  • Will companies have to pay for separate counsel for certain employees and must that payment be disclosed to DOJ?
  • Will companies turn people over to the government before proper investigations are completed just to save the company?
  • Will executives cooperate in an investigation? Why should they?
  • What’s the intersection with the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine (which Stephen Bainbridge has already criticized as “running amok”)?
  • Will there be more claims/denials for D & O coverage?
  • Will individuals who cooperate get cooperation credit in their own cases?
  • Will employees turn on their superiors without proper investigation?
  • How will individuals/companies deal with parallel civil/criminal enforcement proceedings?
  • What about indemnification clauses in employment contracts?
  • Will there be more trials because there is little incentive for a corporation to plead guilty?
  • What about data privacy restrictions for multinationals who operate in EU?
  • How will this affect voluntary disclosure under the US Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizational Defendants, especially in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act cases?
  • What ‘s the impact on joint defense agreements?
  • As a lawyer for lawyers who want to be whistleblowers, can you ever advise them to take the chance of losing their license?

I didn’t have time to talk about the added complication of potential director liability under Caremark and its progeny. During my compliance officer days, I used Caremark’s name in vain to get more staff, budget, and board access so that I could train them on the basics on the US Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations. I explained to the Board that this line of cases required them to have some level of oversight over an effective compliance program. Among other things, Caremark required a program with “timely, accurate information sufficient to allow management and the board, each within its scope, to reach informed judgments concerning the [company’s] compliance with law and its business performance.”

I, like other compliance officers, often reviewed/re-tooled our compliance program after another company had negotiated a deferred or nonprosecution agreement with the government. These DPAs had an appendix with everything that the offending company had to do to avoid prosecution. Rarely, if ever, did the DPA mention an individual wrongdoer, and that’s been the main criticism and likely the genesis of the Yates Memo.

Boards will now likely have to take more of a proactive leadership role in demanding investigations at an early stage rather than relying on the GC or compliance officer to inform them of what has already occurred. Boards may need to hire their own counsel to advise on them on this and/or require the general counsel to have outside counsel conduct internal investigations at the outset. This leads to other interesting questions. For example, what happens if executives retain their own counsel and refuse to participate in an investigation that the Board requests? Should the Board designate a special committee (similar to an SLC in the shareholder derivative context) to make sure that there is no taint in the investigation or recommendations? At what point will the investigation become a reportable event for a public company? Will individual board members themselves lawyer up?

I will definitely have a lot to write about this Fall. If you have any thoughts leave them below or email me at mnarine@stu.edu.

This is just me musing a bit, but in following up my post on how LLCs can choose to “be corporations” for federal tax purposes, meaning they get C corp tax treatment, I was thinking that maybe the IRS could just stop using state-law designations at all.  That is, stop having “corporate” tax treatment at all. 

My proposal is not abolishing corporate tax – that’s a much longer post and one I am not sure I’d agree with.  Instead, the proposal is to have entities choose from options that are linked the Internal Revenue Code, and not to a particular entity. Thus, we would have (1) entity taxation, called C Tax, where an entity chooses to pay tax at the entity level, which would be typical C Corp taxation; (2) pass-through taxation, called K Tax, which is what we usually think of as partnership tax; and (3) we get rid of S corps, which can now be LLCs, anyway, which would allow an entity to choose S Tax. 

This post deals with the tax code, which means I am in over my head, and because this is tax related, it means the solution is a lot more complicated than this proposal.  But now that the code provisions are not really linked to the state law entity, I think we should try refer to state entities as state entities, and federal tax status with regard to federal tax status.  Under such a code, it would be a little easier for people to understand the concept behind state entity status, and it would make more sense to people that a “C Corp” does mean “publicly traded corporation” (a far-too common misunderstanding).  Thus, we could have C Tax corporations, S Tax LLCs, K Tax LLCs, for example.  We’d know tax status and state-entity status quite simply and we’d separate the concepts. 

A guy can dream, right?

Professor William Birdthistle at Chicago-Kent College of Law is publishing his new book, Empire of the Fund with Oxford University Press.  A brief introductory video for the book (available here) demonstrates both Professor Birdthistle’s charming accent and talent for video productions (this is obviously not his first video rodeo). Professor Birdthistle has generously provided our readers with a window into the book’s thesis and highlights some of its lessons.  I’ll run a second feature next week focusing on the process of writing a book—an aspiration/current project for many of us.

Empire of the Fund is segmented into four digestible parts:  anatomy of a fund describing the history and function of mutual funds, diseases & disorders addressing fees, trading practices and disclosures, alternative remedies introducing readers to ETFs, target date funds and other savings vehicles, and cures where Birdthistle highlights his proposals. For the discussion of the Jones v. Harris case alone, I think I will assign this book to my corporate law seminar class for our “book club”.  As other reviewers have noted, the book is funny and highly readable, especially as it sneaks in financial literacy.  And now, from Professor Birdthistle:

Things that the audience might learn:

The SEC does practically zero enforcement on fees.  [pp. 215-216]  Even though every expert understands the importance of fees on mutual fund investing, the SEC has brought just one or only two cases in its entire history against advisors charging excessive fees.  Section 36(b) gives the SEC and private plaintiffs a cause of action, but the SEC has basically ignored it; even prompting Justice Scalia to ask why during oral arguments in Jones v. Harris?  Private plaintiffs, on the other hand, bring cases against the wrong defendants (big funds with deep pockets but relatively reasonable fees).  So I urge the SEC to bring one of these cases to police the outer bounds of stratospheric fund fees.

The only justification for 12b-1 fees has been debunked.  [pp. 81-83]  Most investors don’t know much about 12b-1 fees and are surprised by the notion that they should be paying to advertise funds in which they already invest to future possible investors.  The industry’s response is that spending 12b-1 fees will bring in more investors and thus lead to greater savings for all investors via economies of scale.  The SEC’s own financial economist, however, studied these claims and found (surprisingly unequivocally for a government official) that, yes, 12b-1 fees certainly are effective at bringing in new investment but, no, funds do not then pass along any savings to the funds’ investors.  I sketch this out in a dialogue on page 81 between a pair of imaginary nightclub denizens.

Target-date funds are more dangerous than most people realize.  [pp. 172-174]  Target-date funds are embraced by many as a panacea to our investing problem and have been extremely successful as such.  But I point out some serious drawbacks with them.  First, they are in large part an end-of-days solution in which we essentially give up on trying to educate investors and encourage them simply to set and forget their investments; that’s a path to lowering financial literacy, not raising it (which may be a particularly acute issue if my second objection materializes).  Second, TDFs rely entirely on the assumption that the bond market is the safety to which all investors should move as they age; but if we’re heading for a historic bear market on bonds (as several intelligent and serious analysts have posited), we’ll be in very large danger with a somnolent investing population

Continue Reading Book Spotlight: Empire of the Fund by William Birdthistle

OK.  I know it’s not yet quite time to panic about syllabi and such for the fall semester.  But that first day of class does approach, and I know some of you out there have already given some thought to innovating your teaching for the fall.  Maybe you’re new to teaching or teaching a new (or new-to-you) course.  Maybe you’re trying to spice up or change the direction of a course you’ve taught for a while.  Maybe this post will give you some new food for thought . . . .

For a number of years, my colleague George Kuney, the Director of the business law center at UT Law, has asked students to invest in a particular Chapter 11 bankruptcy case as a capstone experience in his Bankruptcy and Reorganizations course.  The students, working in pairs or small groups,  are required to review all of the documents in the case docket and provide summaries that integrate those filings with learning from the course and supplemental research.  George makes the resulting case studies available to the public.  The cumulation of case studies created by students in this course has gotten quite impressive over the years.  And the case studies get significant readership.

I often have said that it’s hard for a law student to identify gaps in knowledge unless the student undertakes to write or speak about the law.  George’s exercise offers students the opportunity to both write and speak about the law in a practical setting.  The final work product is a joint writing, but along the way, the students engage verbally to discuss between or among themselves what to present and how to present it in the final case study.

The project also helps students to see the immediate relevance of the law they are learning to find and apply in the course.  Someone out there is using that law right now in a context that requires issue and rule identification and legal analysis and judgment.  The students review and assess the decisions and actions of legal counsel and their clients real-time–just as the news media is reporting on those decisions and actions, in some cases.  Wow.

I see a lot of value in this method of teaching.  I am playing around with changing my Securities Regulation course (which next will be offered in the spring) to incorporate a smaller-scale version of an exercise like this.  It may take me a while to come up with something that works, but I am going to give it a go.  Let me know if you’ve used a project like this in any of your classes.  I would be curious to know what folks are doing in this regard.

I am stealing Haskell’s thunder on this one (at his suggestion) to promote this position at Marist College.  Little known facts (other than for folks, like Haskell, who know my family well): my daughter is a Marist Red Fox (that’s the school’s mascot) having graduated from there with a degree in Media Studies.  It’s a lovely small liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, NY.  And its new President is David N. Yellen, the former Dean and Professor of Law (criminal law expert) at Loyola University Chicago School of Law.  Here are key points from the position announcement (linked to from the first sentence below):

Marist College invites applications and nominations for the position of Assistant /Associate Professor of Law/Business Law to join the School of Management beginning Fall, 2016.

Duties and Responsibilities:
This tenure track position will involve teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses (including online courses) and maintaining a high level of professional activity through research and service in the candidate’s area of emphasis

Qualifications:
Candidates must have a commitment to excellence in teaching and research and should have a JD degree and previous experience teaching legal related and business law courses in a School of Management and/or Business. Professional experience as a practitioner is also desirable.

Required Applicant Documents:
Resume, Cover Letter, References

Position Open Date:
07/08/2016

Speaking of tactics that managers use thwart shareholder activists –

Sean Griffith and Natalia Reisel have posted a new paper to SSRN, Dead Hand Proxy Puts, Hedge Fund Activism, and the Cost of Capital, analyzing the effects of dead hand proxy puts.  These are loan covenants that allow the lender to require complete loan repayment in the event of a change of control that results from an actual or threatened proxy contest, and that cannot be waived by the borrower – i.e., the incumbent directors cannot settle with the dissident, give their blessing to the new directors, and thereby avoid the provisions (the “dead hand”).

Now my instinct on these provisions has always been that they improperly interfere with shareholder suffrage by insulating the incumbent board from the market for corporate control.  I wondered whether these provisions were in fact valued by lenders, or whether they were inserted at the behest of management to protect themselves from challenge, with lender acquiescence/indifference.

But the authors find that these provisions do, in fact, have value to lenders – and thus to corporations.  They are more likely to be adopted by firms that are potential targets of shareholder activists (unsurprising), and, critically, they lower the cost of the firm’s debt. 

The authors also find that though the provisions tend to be found in loan agreements – where they can be easily waived or modified if the lenders believe a change of control will not imperil the loan – their presence may be valued by bondholders, who cannot use such provisions as easily because it is more difficult for them to overcome collective action problems to modify them later.  (Question: is it likely activists would bargain with the lenders in advance, and make the lenders’ endorsement part of their platform when soliciting shareholders?  Is that a thing activists do?  I admit my ignorance.  If not – if the activist intends to bargain after gaining control – that would be a helluva risk for shareholders to take.) 

In any event, the upshot appears to be, directors can preempt a proxy fight and increase corporate value by adopting this kind of financial technology, which is different than the financial technology that activists would likely adopt, but – unlike typical activist tactics – benefits both shareholders and creditors.  

The critical question, then, is whether the value to shareholders generated by these provisions is equal to the value that would be generated by a shareholder activist.   The authors state that they will analyze this question in connection with an upcoming paper – and I look forward to seeing what they come up with.

Like Anne and Joan, I enjoyed the Berle Symposium and found it incredibly valuable. As they have mentioned, former Chancellor Chandler’s presentation was definitely a highlight, and it was affirming to hear Delaware law described as I understand it, if much more eloquently expressed than I have managed. Former Chancellor Chandler appeared to make clear that directors of Delaware firms could be at risk if they admit to taking an action that is not aimed at (eventually) meeting the short or long-term financial interests of shareholders.  

Former Chancellor Chandler’s description of Delaware law, both in the symposium and in his eBay case, coupled with the law review writings of Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice Leo Strine, confirm, in my mind, that benefit corporations could be useful, at least in Delaware, for entrepreneurs who want to admit pursing strategies that are not aimed at benefiting shareholders in the short or long run. For example, I think some companies, like Patagonia, make decisions that benefit the environment, even though the directors may honestly believe that financial costs will far exceed financial benefits, even in the long-term. 

Interestingly, however, much of what I heard from the B Lab representatives at the symposium was about how benefit corporations can do just as well, if not better, than traditional corporations from a financial perspective. This obviously poses an empirical question that we may get better answers to in the coming years. But if you can “do well by doing good” then then entrepreneurs, even under Delaware law, seem likely to avoid legal problems given the protection of the business judgment rule and the argument that financial benefits will eventually follow from their society-focused actions.

The benefitcorp.net website has a list of reasons to become a benefit corporation, which are:

  • Reduced Director Liability

  • Expanded Stockholder Rights

  • A Reputation For Leadership

  • An Advantage in Attracting Talent

  • Increased Access to Private Investment Capital

  • Increased Attractiveness to Retail Investors and Mission Protection as a Publicly Traded Company

  • Demonstration Effect

I am a bit surprised that more of these reasons are not focused on societal and environmental benefit (and am not sure why mission protection is limited to publicly traded companies, especially when there are no stand-alone publicly traded benefit corporations today — though there will likely soon be some soon.) I question whether all of these benefits are true. For example, I have heard mixed things about benefit corporations from investors, and the liability issue is completely untested. But if all of these things are true, and social entrepreneurs do get better access to capital and an advantage attracting employees, etc., then I think the benefit corporation form is less necessary as a legal matter. Maybe the thought is that benefit corporations have expressive value or that they provide an extra layer of protection. But, as a legal matter, if you can justify your social actions by pointing to potential long-term financial benefits, you do not really need a new form, even in Delaware (and, of course, many other states are even more permissive with social actions). Maybe benefit corporation proponents see the real value in the M&A context when facing Unocal/Revlon, but Page & Katz showed ways around those issues, especially if focused on long-term value. Entrepreneurs could also incorporate outside of Delaware, in a state that has expressly rejected Revlon.

Personally, while it is possible for some firms to do well by doing good, I think social entrepreneurs will often be openly sacrificing financial returns—they will be doing good through purposeful financial sacrifice. As such, an benefit corporation option, at least in states like Delaware.

There was quite a lot of good discussion at the Berle Symposium, and I may have more to write about it in later posts. 

SEC disclosures are meant to provide material information to investors. As I hope all of my business associations students know, “information is material if there is a substantial likelihood that a reasonable investor would consider the information important in deciding how to vote or make an investment decision.”

Regulation S-K, the central repository for non-financial disclosure statements, has been in force without substantial revision for over thirty years. The SEC is taking comments until July 21st on on the rule however, it is not revising “other disclosure requirements in Regulation S-K, such as executive compensation and governance, or the required disclosures for foreign private issuers, business development companies, or other categories of registrants.” Specifically, as stated in its 341-page Comment Release, the SEC seeks input on:

  • whether, and if so, how specific disclosures are important or useful to making investment and voting decisions and whether more, less or different information might be needed;
  • whether, and if so how, we could revise our current requirements to enhance the information provided to investors while considering whether the action will promote efficiency, competition, and capital formation;
  • whether, and if so how, we could revise our requirements to enhance the protection of investors;
  • whether our current requirements appropriately balance the costs of disclosure with the benefits;
  • whether, and if so how, we could lower the cost to registrants of providing information to investors, including considerations such as advancements in technology and communications;
  • whether and if so, how we could increase the benefits to investors and facilitate investor access to disclosure by modernizing the methods used to present, aggregate and disseminate disclosure; and
  • any challenges of our current disclosure requirements and those that may result from possible regulatory responses explored in this release or suggested by commenters.

As of this evening, thirty comments had been submitted including from Wachtell Lipton, which cautions against “overdisclosure” and urges more flexible means of communicating with investors; the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, which observes that 40% of 10-K disclosures on sustainability use boilerplate language and recommends a market standard for industry-specific disclosures (which SASB is developing); and the Pension Consulting Alliance, which agrees with SASB’s methodology and states that:

[our] clients increasingly request more ESG information related to their investments. Key PCA advisory services that are affected by ESG issues include:

  • Investment beliefs and investment policy development
  • Manager selection and monitoring
  • Portfolio-wide exposure to material ESG risks
  • Education and analysis on macro and micro issues
  • Proxy voting and engagement

This is an interesting time for people like me who study disclosures. Last week the SEC released its revised rule on Dodd-Frank §1504 that had to be re-written after court challenges. That rule requires an issuer “to disclose payments made to the U.S. federal government or a foreign government if the issuer engages in the commercial development of oil, natural gas, or minerals and is required to file annual reports with the Commission under the Securities Exchange Act.” Representative Bill Huizenga, the Chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Monetary Policy and Trade, introduced an amendment to the FY2017 Financial Services and General Government (FSGG) Appropriations bill, H.R. 5485, to prohibit funding for enforcement for another governance disclosure–Dodd-Frank conflict minerals.

SEC Chair White has herself questioned the wisdom of the SEC requiring and monitoring certain disclosures, noting the potential for investor information overload. Nonetheless, she and the agency are committed to enforcement. Her fresh look at disclosures reflects a balanced approach. If you have some spare time this summer and think the SEC’s disclosure system needs improvement, now is the time to let the agency know.