Marc

The Business Law Prof Blog is pleased to announce that Professor Marc Edelman will be joining us as a guest blogger for the month of  March. Quoting from his online bio, “Marc Edelman is an Associate Professor of Law at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York. He specializes in sports law, antitrust, intellectual property, and gaming law.” During the summers, he also teaches at Fordham University School of Law.

I was previously familiar with Marc Edelman’s work through my interest in sports and through a bit of reading in the antitrust area. All of his areas of interest have significant intersections with business law and I look forward to reading his posts. Given that he is one of the most recognized experts in the area of law & sports, we are especially privileged to have him with us right before March Madness. 

As many of you know, both I and my co-blogger Joan Heminway have written several articles on crowdfunding. My articles are available here and Joan’s are available here. I think that a properly structured crowdfunding exemption (unfortunately, not the exemption Congress authorized in Title III of the JOBS Act) could revolutionize the finance of very small businesses. 

Professor Darian M. Ibrahim, of William & Mary Law School, has posted an interesting and important new paper on crowdfunding, Equity Crowdfunding: A Market for Lemons? It’s available here.

Professor Ibrahim discusses two types of “crowdfunding” approved by the JOBS Act: (1) sales to accredited investors pursuant to SEC Rule 506(c), adopted pursuant to Title II of the JOBS Act; and (2) sales to any investors pursuant to the crowdfunding exemption authorized by Title III of the JOBS Act, but not yet implemented by the SEC. I don’t think the former should be called crowdfunding, but many people call it that, so I’ll excuse Professor Ibrahim.

Title II “Crowdfunding”

Professor Ibrahim points out that traditional investing by venture capitalists and angel investors is characterized by contractual controls and direct personal attention to the business by the investors. This allows the investors to monitor the investment and control misbehavior, and the investors’ participation and advice also provides a benefit to the business.

Ibrahim argues that Title II (506(c)) “crowdfunding” has been successful because it mimics what angel investors have been doing all along. It’s not really revolutionary, just making the existing model of angel investing more efficient by moving it to the Internet.

Title III Crowdfunding

Title III crowdfunding, on the other hand, is revolutionary; it doesn’t resemble anything that currently exists in the United States. If the SEC ever adopts the required rules, issuers will be selling to unaccredited investors who lack the knowledge and sophistication of venture capitalists and angel investors. It’s less obvious how they will judge among the various offerings and protect themselves from misbehavior by the entrepreneur.

Some have argued that the new crowdfunding exemption will appeal only to those companies that are too low quality to obtain traditional VC or angel funding, leaving unaccredited investors with the bottom of the barrel. Ibrahim disagrees, arguing that Title III crowdfunding will appeal to some high-quality entrepreneurs—those who need less cash for their businesses or are unwilling to share control with VCs or angel investors.

But how are we to avoid a “lemons” problem if the unsophisticated investors likely to participate in crowdfunding cannot distinguish good companies from bad? Ibrahim poses two possible answers. The first is the “wisdom of crowds,” the idea that the collective decision-making of a large crowd can approximate or even exceed expert judgments. Possibly, although I’m not completely sure. Collective judgments by non-experts can equal or surpass the judgments of experts, but I’m still unsure that the necessary conditions for that to happen are met on crowdfunding platforms. At best, I think the wisdom of the crowd is only a partial answer.

Ibrahim’s second answer is for the funding portals who host crowdfunding offers to curate the offerings—investigate the quality of the offerings and either provide ratings or limit their sites to higher-quality offerings. I think this is a good idea, but, unfortunately, the SEC’s proposed regulations would prohibit funding portals from doing this. Funding portals required to check for fraud, but that’s all they can do. Any attempt to exclude entrepreneurs for reasons other thanfraud or to provide ratings would go beyond what the proposed regulations allow and subject the portals to regulation under the Investment Advisers Act. Ibrahim has the right solution, but it’s going to require congressional action to get there.

Abstract of the Paper

Here’s the full abstract of Professor Ibrahim’s article:

Angel investors and venture capitalists (VCs) have funded Google, Facebook, and virtually every technological success of the last thirty years. These investors operate in tight geographic networks which mitigates uncertainty, information asymmetry, and agency costs both pre- and post-investment. It follows, then, that a major concern with equity crowdfunding is that the very thing touted about it – the democratization of investing through the Internet – also eliminates the tight knit geographic communities that have made angels and VCs successful.
Despite this foundational concern, entrepreneurial finance’s move to cyberspace is inevitable. This Article examines online investing both descriptively and normatively by tackling Titles II and III of the JOBS Act of 2012 in turn. Title II allows startups to generally solicit accredited investors for the first time; Title III will allow for full-blown equity crowdfunding to unaccredited investors when implemented.

I first show that Title II is proving successful because it more closely resembles traditional angel investing than some new paradigm of entrepreneurial finance. Title II platforms are simply taking advantage of the Internet to reduce the transaction costs of traditional angel operations and add passive angels to their networks at a low cost.

Title III, on the other hand, will represent a true equity crowdfunding situation and thus a paradigm shift in entrepreneurial finance. Despite initial concerns that only low-quality startups and investors will use Title III, I argue that there are good reasons why Title III could attract high-quality participants as well. The key question will be whether high-quality startups can signal themselves as such to avoid the classic “lemons” problem. I contend that harnessing the wisdom of crowds and redefining Title III”s “funding portals” to serve as reputational intermediaries are two ways to avoid the lemons problem.

It’s definitely worth reading.

Andrew Schwartz at the University of Colorado is also working on a paper that addresses the problems of uncertainty, information asymmetry, and agency costs in Title III crowdfunding. I have read the draft and it’s also very good, but it’s not yet publicly available. I will let you know when it is.

The following comes to us fromJ. Scott Colesanti and Mandy Li Weiner:

    To a degree large or moderate, New York shall soon be at the vanguard of Bitcoin regulation. Since last July, observers have been asked to witness the shotgun marriage of the coin of no realm and a daunting state licensing measure; to date, no vows have been taken.

    The initial proposal from the Department of Financial Services was truly bold and far-reaching. Eschewing a classification of Bitcoin itself, the Department took aim at parties doing business with State residents by issuing, buying/selling, converting or storing the notorious cryptocurrency (and other, similar virtual currencies). Such entities and operators would have been required to register for the popularly dubbed “Bitlicense” at an indeterminate cost.

The requirements attending the proposed Bitlicense were rich and varied. Traditional State consumer protection provisions focused on customer complaints and record keeping. More novel provisions seemingly borrowed from securities law authorities on business continuity planning and anti-money laundering programs, and from sister State warnings regarding cryptocurrencies as investments. Consequentially, New York’s broad, multi-layered protocol would have closed the door of entry to an appreciable number of businesses and startups, as well as related enterprises.

Not surprisingly, last Fall, there emerged on the Internet (albeit in piecemeal fashion) a consistent chorus of domestic, interstate, and international objections. That commentary, from parties including conversion sites and start-up companies, voiced concerns ranging from infringement of free speech to niche resentment at measures designed for financial intermediaries. Meanwhile, support for the initial proposal in the form of public comment letters was hard to locate. And, among federal authorities, only FinCEN has to date directly addressed the question of regulating the ersatz currency.

    Still a Shotgun Marriage

Complicating matters is the continuing bad press attached to Bitcoin. Another round of mishaps at conversion exchanges in the past year highlighted issues ranging from questionable marketing to cybersecurity. Other States evidence both the carrot and the stick in the inevitable march towards rules governing the persistent cash alternative. California is considering a measure to coronate the online currency with legal status. Conversely, Missouri voiced its concerns via a June 2014 enforcement action that faulted a company for inadequate disclosures about virtual currencies in general. Concurrently, Congress is entertaining Bills that would shield Bitcoin exchangers from State regulation altogether. The one consistent truth is that supporters of the cryptocurrency seem to have established a daily Internet presence. Here, again, New York has seized the opportunity for regulatory arbitrage: In January, a spokesperson from DFS felt compelled to correct the statement by exchanger/storage repository Coinbase that it had been the first licensed Bitcoin exchange in a plethora of states including New York (no licenses have as yet been issued).

Interestingly, DFS Superintendant Lawsky himself has acknowledged that “The [proposed] rules also generally mirror the types of requirements that other banks, financial institutions, and money transmitters have to live by – with some alterations owing to the unique nature of virtual currencies.” Yet the tension among interests appears to be growing, and New York officials no doubt find their efforts pausing to balance the State’s heightened interest in protecting consumers (and extinguishing untrustworthy companies) while permitting industry creativity and innovation to flourish. Accordingly, the revised DFS regulation continues to grapple with the dual aims of a stringent standard and enough wiggle room to account for dynamic regulatory and entrepreneurial fields.

    The Main Course

Thus, the revised legislation retains many of the original provisions, but it also attempts to appease more parties. For example, Bitlicensees are held to slightly less record-keeping and anti-money laundering protocols.

The price for the Bitlicense has been mercifully capped at $5,000. And the definitional section now makes equally clear that software development and “merchant” payment activities will often be exempt. But the grandest largess takes the form of a 2-year conditional license (granted at the “sole discretion” of the Superintendant), a variation expressly designed for “an applicant that does not satisfy all of the regulatory requirements upon licensing.”

Additionally, third parties have benefitted from the revisions: The revised regulations clarify that certain software developers, “miners” (i.e., creators of Bitcoin), those offering customer loyalty programs, rewards (such as airline vouchers) and gift cards are not required to obtain a Bitlicense.

To be sure, the 2015 changes to the 2014 proposal exemplify a newfound DFS responsiveness to the concern of the crossroads of the technology and finance that is virtual currency. However, pure capitalists should note: Even in amended form, the proposal contains substantial costs attending requirements of cash reserves, quarterly reporting, the employ of cybersecurity employees, business continuity planning, transaction records and consumer disclosures. Further, some new obligations have been added – most notably, the requirement that the surety trust account for customers be maintained with a “qualified custodian” (i.e., a banking entity approved by the DFS). The next round of comments should reveal whether the Department’s revised approach has achieved meaningful supervision of the industry without concurrently extinguishing some of the characteristics that make virtual currency attractive in the first place.

The revised regulations, which are available at http://www.dfs.ny.gov/legal/regulations/rev_bitlicense_reg_framework.htm, are presently subject to a 30-day comment period. The union of registration and innovation will likely not be decided until late 2015. By borrowing from expansive notions found in securities law and long arm statutes, the seminal State law with the decidedly federal twist will, of course, garner national attention. With objections to strict regulation ranging from Congress to IT developers, wedding guests from both sides of the aisle are still advised to hold onto their receipts.

Mandy Li Weiner, Hofstra University School of Law Class of 2017, is a Business Law Honors Concentration Fellow.

Professor J. Scott Colesanti, a former industry regulator and arbitrator, has taught Securities Regulation at Hofstra since 2002. His 2014 study of the potential application of the securities laws to Bitcoin exchanges is available on SSRN.

This seems to have been a great week for business stories with a touch of the absurd.

First up, we have Footnoted.org’s fantastic catch in Goldman’s 10-K.  Apparently, Goldman now has a new risk factor:

[O]ur businesses ultimately rely on human beings as our greatest resource, and from time-to-time, they make mistakes that are not always caught immediately by our technological processes or by our other procedures which are intended to prevent and detect such errors. These can include calculation errors, mistakes in addressing emails, errors in software development or implementation, or simple errors in judgment. We strive to eliminate such human errors through training, supervision, technology and by redundant processes and controls. Human errors, even if promptly discovered and remediated, can result in material losses and liabilities for the firm.

We can only speculate as to what specific, as-yet-undisclosed, human error prompted this disclosure, but if I had to make a bet, my money would be on an email address auto-fill mistake that is now the subject of some behind-the-scenes settlement discussions, the details of which will only come to light if negotiations fail and a public lawsuit is filed.

Next up, we have a Hunger-Games inspired video created by Morgan Stanley for its branch managers’ meeting.  The 10-minute long video depicts branch managers forced to compete to the death to maintain their positions.  Apparently, Morgan Stanley shelved the video (which cost $100K to produce) out of concern that it displayed a certain callousness towards the actual real life people who were losing their jobs.  So, now, of course, to demonstrate its sensitivity, Morgan Stanley has launched an internal investigation to discover the identity of the person who leaked the video.

Also, the Supreme Court decided Yates v. United States, concerning whether the disposal of undersized fish counted as the destruction of a tangible object intended to impede a federal investigation, in violation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.   The Court held that it did not.  Others have explored the implications of Yates for Obamacare and the case against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s friends, but I’m far more interested in the headlines the case inspired, including In Overturning Conviction, Supreme Court Says Fish Are Not Always Tangible, Supreme Court: One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (a reference to Justice Kagan’s dissent, which cited Dr. Seuss), Fisherman let off the hook in U.S. white-collar crime ruling, High Court SOX Fish Ruling Cuts Hole In Prosecutors’ Net, Supreme Court Throws Prosecutors Overboard in Fisherman Case, Supreme Court tosses ‘fishy’ conviction of Florida fisherman into the drink, and my personal favorite, Cortez case: Small fish, wide net.

Last but not least, the dress may be blue – but it’s been nothing but green for the British retailer that sells it. (BuzzFeed didn’t do so badly, either; it had to increase its server capacity by 40% to handle dress-related traffic.)

I’ve enjoyed getting to know a bit about University of Pennsylvania Psychology Professor Angela Duckworth’s work on “grit.” Duckworth and her co-authors call grit “perseverance and passion for long-term goals,” and they claim that grit can be predictive of certain types of success.  

Can we, as educators, teach grit? If so, how? Duckworth asks, but doesn’t fully answer these questions in her popular TED talk. She does, however, think Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset, which I wrote about a few months ago, offers the most hope.

Do readers have any thoughts on this subject? Feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me your thoughts.

Last week, I posted about Walmart’s ballyhooed wage hike and asked whether boycotts and activism actually work. Apparently, the President was so impressed that he called the company’s CEO to thank him. Some Walmart workers, however, aren’t as pleased because without more hours, they still can’t make ends meet. Nonetheless, TJX, the parent company of retailers TJ Maxx and Home Goods announced yesterday that its employees would also receive a pay raise. Is this altruism? Have the retail giants caved to pressure?

As some commented on the blog last week and to me privately, it’s more likely that these megaretailers have implemented these “pro-employee” moves to reduce turnover, raise morale, and most important compete in a tightening job market. But one LinkedIn commenter from Australia believes that boycotts in general can work, stating:

My experience with having organised boycotts is that they work, but they take time. They create the conditions for public awareness of corporate activities, and put pressure on the company to change. They are effectively the ‘bad cop’ of civil society pressure. Consequently, they do not work on their own, requiring also the ‘good cop’ – civil society organisations and market conditions that allow the subject of the boycott to shift behaviour. Market conditions include a broader ‘meta boycott’ in which companies needing access to supply chains must change because supply chains have changed, only accepting product that is acceptable to CSOs (the ‘good’ CSOs, who have certification programmes, and other initiatives for the company to opt for. If you are looking for a case study of these conditions, I suggest you follow the Tasmanian forest industry debate in Australia. Here, an entire industry was worn down after years of boycotts, market campaigns, and demands from purchasers for FSC certified product only. The fascinating addendum to this case study is the state government (and the Federal government, unsuccessfully), are still advocating behaviours that not even the companies want. They want to sign the ‘peace deal’ and the government(s) are trying to prolong the ‘war’ – for political, election-related issues. All this indicates that boycotts do not work in isolation, and if they do they are less likely to work. 

Investors too are putting pressure on companies. Just yesterday, a group of 60 investors with four trillion in assets under management called for companies to do more for workers’ human rights, including wages. Because I study business and human rights with a special emphasis on labor issues, I will wait to see what happens with all of this pressure. I will also monitor the share price, shareholder proposals, and whether there is any evidence that consumers reward Walmart and TJX for their better treatment of workers.  

Startupstash-icon-90x90

Via an Ethan Mollick (Wharton) tweet, I was recently introduced to Startup Stash.

Startup Stash is a beautifully simple set of curated resources for entrepreneurs. The categories of resources range from Naming to Hosting to Market Research to Marketing to Legal to Human Resources to Finance. And more.

As a law professor, I was obviously most curious about the legal resources. The list has the controversial and well-known Legal Zoom, but also has some relatively unknown resources. For example, UpCounsel (“get high-quality legal services from top business attorneys at reasonable rates”) was new to me. You can see the full list of legal resources here.

As previously stated, the Startup Stash list is curated, so there are only 10 legal resources, all of which look interesting, if also potentially dangerous for those without legal training. As I tell my business students, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and consulting with a knowledgeable attorney early in the start-up process can be invaluable. 

On Monday the White House released a report on The Effects of Conflicted Investment Advise on Retirement Savings which highlights the unique constraints of many retirement investors.  The current “suitable” investment advise standard leaves room for financial service provides to channel retirement investors into investments with higher fees paid by the investor but higher commissions earned by the professional.  Higher fees paid on investments can reduce the return on savings an average of 12% over the life of the retirement account.  In other words, paying less in fees could mean that retirement savings could last an average of an additional 5 years.  This has major implications for individual financial stability as well as our national retirement policy, which is increasingly dependent upon self-directed retirement savings in the form of 401(k)s and IRAs.

To reduce the conflict of interest and lessen the likelihood that retirement investors will “select” higher-fee investment vehicles based on the self-interested advise of financial services providers, the White House is asking the Department of Labor to impose a fiduciary duty standard requiring the advise provided to be consistent with the best interests of the investor.  This is such an intuitive position that many investors think that financial advisers and brokers are already subject to this requirement.  The proposal would bring the legal reality and enforceable duty in line with the public perspective.  This is not to say that there won’t be significant opposition from financial services providers who argue that the industry is already highly regulated.

The announcement and the focus on both retirement investors and the impact of fees on retirement savings is of particular interest to me.  I have written three law review articles on related topics.  

  • Citizen Shareholders and Modernizing the Agency Paradigm (2012) articulates the ways in which retirement investors (I call them Citizen Shareholders) are different from traditional corporate law shareholders;
  • The Retirement Revolution (2013) describes how the fundamental shift in the retirement landscape imposed additional risks onto the retirement investors; and 
  • The Outside Investor (2014) explores how the intersection of corporate law and ERISA standards leave many retirement investors exposed to additional market risks rather than intuitive guess that these investors would be more protected.

-Anne Tucker

President Obama just vetoed the bill approving construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.  The President has said the veto is not about the value of the pipeline, but that it represents the President’s view the pipeline should not go around the State Department evaluation process. 

The veto comes at a time when oil transportation is a increasingly an area of concern, especially in light of recent rail accidents in Quebec and West Virginia.  I was recently part of a news story discussing the rail safety concerns in my part of country — here — and pipeline transportation tends to be much safer for human safety, though it raises other environmental concerns.

It’s not clear whether Keystone XL would be built any time soon, in light of low oil prices, but the veto will certainly keep people talking.  More on this soon.  

The New York Times has an interesting article today about SEC Chair Mary Jo White. Her husband is a partner at Cravath, Swaine, & Moore, so she has to recuse herself from any cases, enforcement actions, or investigations involving the firm’s clients. The Times claims that the resulting 2-2 split has given the Republican commissioners a little more control over some settlements than they otherwise would have had.