Happy New Year.

Starting Saturday morning (or maybe tomorrow night), I’ll be live tweeting from the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) conference. Because I teach both civil procedure and business associations, my tweets will largely relate to those sessions as well as sessions for new law professors.

Next Thursday I will summarize the high points of the conference, at least from my perspective. 

My twitter handle is @mlnarine and the AALS hashtag is #AALS2015. If you’re at the conference and a blog reader, please say hello.

We are all familiar with a distinguishing features of investing in operating companies and investing in mutual funds: sale of stock in operating companies and redemption at NAV (net asset value) in mutual funds.  An interesting article (Mutual Fund Liquidity and Fiduciary Conflicts of Interest)1 was recently brought to my attention which argues that the liquidity costs of the redemption model disadvantages long-term investors– those investors who stay in the fund.  

Redemption of mutual fund shares requires the fund to maintain liquidity (uninvested assets) in order to supply the NAV to any departing investor.  The required liquidity extracts a small cost on the fund for each exit.  This cost, small when evaluated for a single trade, becomes significant in the aggregate.  Trading and liquidity cost estimates range from $10-17 billion annually, costs that are born exclusively by the investors who stay in the fund. This means that long-term investors, particularly those investors who are relatively locked into their mutual funds such as retirement investors (a group I refer to in my scholarship as Citizen Shareholders) are subsidizing the dominance of the exit strategy for other retail investors.  This has deep implications for the arguments advanced by John Morley and Curtis Quinn in their 2010 article Taking Exit Rights Seriously,2  where they argue that exit is the dominant strategy over voting and litigation in mutual funds.  If exit is the dominant strategy for mutual fund investors, and there is a cost associated with that exit, who should bear the cost?  I have an essay forthcoming this spring that further addresses question of exit rights as they pertain to Citizen Shareholders.

One novel solution advanced by Sacks Equalization Model, Inc., is a patented algorithm that assigns a small liquidity cost to all selling investors and to all new investors to push the transaction cost on those investors engaging in the transaction, not the stable, long-term investors.

-Anne Tucker

[1] Miles Livingston and David Rakowski, Mutual Fund Liquidity and Conflicts of Interest, Journal of Applied Finance, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp 95-103 (2013).

[2] John Morley & Quinn Curtis, Taking Exit Rights Seriously: Why Governance and Fee Litigation Don’t Work in Mutual Funds, 120 Yale L.J. 84 (2010).

 

I continue to document how courts (and lawyers) continue to conflate (and thus confuse) LLCs and corporations, so I did a quick look at some recent cases to see if anything of interest was recently filed. Sure enough, there are more than few references to “limited liability corporations” (when the court meant “limited liability companies.”  That’s annoying, but not especially interesting at this point.  

One case did grab my eye, though, because because of the way the court lays out and resolves the plaintiffs’ claim.  The case is McKee v. Whitman & Meyers, LLC, 13-CV-793-JTC, 2014 WL 7272748 (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 18, 2014).  In McKee, theplaintiff filed a complaint claiming several violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act against defendants Whitman & Meyers, LLC and Joseph M. Goho, who failed to appear and defend this action, leading to a default judgment. After the default judgment was entered, defense counsel finally responded.  

This case has all sorts of good lessons.  Lesson 1: don’t forget that all named parties matter.  Get this: 

Defense counsel admits that he was under the mistaken assumption that default was to be taken against the corporate entity only. See Item 17. However, default was entered as to both the corporate and individual defendants on July 3, 2014 (Item 9). Defense counsel did not move to vacate the default and in fact did not respond in any way until the default judgment was entered on September 17, 2014. Item 12. Even then, the defense motion was framed as one for an extension of time in which to file an answer (Item 14), rather than a motion to vacate the default or default judgment. Inexplicably, in his papers, defense counsel states that a default judgment has not been entered. See Item 17. Since good cause is to be construed generously and doubts resolved in favor of the defaulting party, see Enron Oil Corp., 10 F.3d at 96, the court will accept the explanation of defense counsel as evidence of a careless lack of attention to procedural detail rather than an egregious and willful default on the part of defendant Goho [the individual and apparent owner of the LLC].
McKee v. Whitman & Meyers, LLC, No. 13-CV-793-JTC, 2014 WL 7272748, at *1 (W.D.N.Y. Dec. 18, 2014).  A link to a free version of the case is here.
 
Wow.  I concede there are some procedural details here, but this sure sounds substantive to me, as well.  
 
Lesson 2: if you name someone in the caption, you probably want to have some allegations about them as a defendant.  Fortunately for defense counsel, the plaintiff’s counsel was not on the ball, either.  Though Goho was named in the caption, the complaint did not describe Goho as a party or contain allegations about Goho’s individual liability for the FDCPA violations. The defendant’s Prayer for Relief also only sought judgment from the Whitman & Myers, LLC. (The court conveniently skips the fact that court probably should have noticed these deficiencies the first time around, before entering default judgment against Goho.)  

Finally, the moment regular readers (see, e.g.,  here, here, here, here, and here) saw coming:
 
Lesson 3: You Can’t Pierce the Corporate Veil of an LLC Because It Doesn’t Have One.  The plaintiff argued that “the court should pierce the corporate veil and hold defendant Goho personally liable.” The court’s response: “[T]here is nothing on the face of the complaint or in the record that would support individual liability for defendant Goho on the basis of corporate veil-piercing . . .”  
 
The court is, of course, correct. However, the sentence should be followed by one that says, “This is because there is no corporation named as a party to this case, so there is no corporate veil to pierce.”  Obviously, the court could have gone on to note that even if the plaintiffs meant for the court to pierce the limited liability veil of the LLC, the allegations were insufficient for that, too.
 
As a side note, it would have been interesting to see how the court would have dealt with the argument that Goho and his LLC were so intertwined that they share legal counsel and that even his own counsel did not immediately recognize the individual and the entity as separate until after default judgment was entered.  (I don’t see that as a winning argument, but it’s better than what was argued.) 
 
Moving forward, I’d like to see courts tell plaintiffs that a request to “pierce the corporate veil” of an LLC amounts to a failure to state a claim.  The court should allow counsel to amend the complaint to get the language right. Until there is a consequence, even a minor one, for merging LLCs and corporations, attorneys and courts will continue to get it wrong.  
 
Thus, a New Year’s Resolution for Courts:  “We will treat corporations and LLCs as separate entity types.”  And, please, after making sure to always call LLCs “limited liability companies,” move on to creating separate veil piercing language.  

This week I received the notice below from Professor Jason Gordon. Professor Gordon is a legal studies and management professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, School of Business. As explained below, he is offering copies of two entrepreneurship books that he thought might be useful to BLPB readers.  

Dear Colleagues,

 

I recently published two texts entitled Business Plans for Growth-Based Ventures and Understanding Business Entities for Entrepreneurs and Managers. These books are designed for use by clinical law professors and as a supplement in entrepreneurship courses. The second text concerns entity selection considerations, but includes entity funding and conversion considerations and specific considerations for startup ventures.

 

The texts also contain supplemental electronic material available for free at TheBusinessProfessor.com.

 

If any of you would like a free copy of either text in Amazon e-book format, please send me your email address at jgordon10 [at] ggc [dot] edu.

 

A preview of the Business Plans E-Book is available here.

 

A preview of the Business Entities E-Book is available here. 

 

Grades are in–a few hours late, but in nevertheless.  It must be almost time for New Year’s Eve, syllabus and first-assignment posting, the AALS conferenece, the first day of classes, . . .  and more job searching for our students!

I was reminded in an email from a student this morning that the hunt for summer and permanent law jobs is revving back up again after the holiday doldrums.  The student, a 1L mentee seeking summer employment, was asking a few questions about my cover letter post, to which I eaerlier had referred him.  I expect to start getting more of these communications from students about their job searches over the next few weeks.

Our brother bloggers over at the Law Skills Prof Blog have already struck while the iron is hot on this issue.  Specifically, Lou Sirico posted a quip on dressing for job interviews the other day.  The quoted advice?  “The interviewer should remember what you said and not what you were wearing.”  

Hmm.  Yeah.  I guess so.  Well, maybe not.

Certainly, that’s the advice I was given by NYU Law’s fabulous placement folks in “the day.”  Then, that meant wearing: a black, navy or midnight blue, or gray skirt suit; a neutral (white, ivory, gray, black) collared shirt or jewel-neck blouse; skin-tone hose; dark, solid-colored, medium-heeled pumps or really lovely flats; and either Barbara Bush pearls (the double strand) or a silk floppy bow tie (like an Hermes twilly, only not as fashion-forward).  Bo-ring.

I am proud (but call me lucky) to have gotten my job wearing (to the initial interview) a deep pink–almost fuchsia–silk-blend skirt suit (midi-length skirt, hip-length jacket), with a white collared blouse, neutral hose, black flats, and a patterned (pink, blue, etc.) floppy silk bow tie.  (This is where the folks in the UT Law Career Center lose faith that they are sending students to the right place when they refer them to me for career advice!)  I was confident and radiant in that suit (although I am not sure I realized that fully at the time), and I am convinced that made a big difference in the reception that I got from people when I wore it.  However, it’s true that I  was interviewed by a woman (a female senior associate in a multicolored silk dress with straight blond hair down to her derrière) and I was seeking employment at an entrepreneurial, individualistic firm–Skadden.  

Continue Reading It’s Interview Season (Again) (Still). What Should Female Candidates for Law Jobs Wear?

Believe it or not, I and the other editors of the Business Law Prof Blog don’t spend all of our time reading and thinking about business law. I assume none of you do, either, so I thought you might be interested in a list of the best non-law books I have run across this year.

I originally planned to put them all in a single post, but I read a number of very good books in 2014, so I decided to divide the list into two posts. Today, fiction. Next week, non-fiction.

I’m limiting both lists to books published relatively recently, so you don’t have to wade through a list of old science fiction or Thomas Hardy novels, no matter how excellent I thought they were when I reread them this year.

Except for the first book, they’re in no real order.

1. Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. If you read only one book on this list, this should be it. This is the best new novel I have read in some time. It centers on a bright young German boy and a blind French girl in the period prior to and during World War II. It’s hard to explain the story in a few words, but I think it’s an absolutely brilliant book.

2. Chang-Rae Lee, On Such a Full Sea. The main character searches for the father of her unborn child in a dystopian future. The book has no real conclusion, and I usually don’t like that, but I’m willing to excuse that, given the excellent writing.

3. Rachel Joyce, Perfect. This brilliant novel has two alternating stories: one about a young boy who becomes obsessed when a friend tells him that two extra seconds will be added to clocks; the other about a disturbed 50-year-old supermarket worker. Keep reading: she eventually ties the two story lines together.

4. Andy Weir, The Martian. An astronaut is stranded on Mars without adequate supplies after his colleagues leave, thinking he’s dead. A solid piece of science fiction.

5. Karen Russell, Sleep Donation. A novella about a sickness that keeps people from sleeping. They use a machine to borrow sleep from sleep donors.

6. Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. I’m not a huge Joshua Ferris fan, but I liked this one. A dentist discovers that someone is posting online in his name about a lost Middle Eastern group and a religion whose primary belief is a doubt that God exists.

7. Jo Walton, My Real Children. I really enjoy Jo Walton’s science fiction, and this book was not an exception. It’s about a woman with Alzheimer’s who remembers two very distinct lives—diverging when she said either “yes” or “no” to a marriage proposal.

8. Matthew Thomas, We are Not Ourselves. A bittersweet first novel about a woman and her families—the family she grew up with and, later, her husband and son. A story of regret and uncertainty, it’s sad and depressing, but extremely good.

9. Bill Roorbach, The Remedy for Love. A fascinating love(?) story involving a small-town lawyer stuck in a tiny, isolated cabin with a disturbed woman during a once-a-century blizzard. A charming story, expertly told.

That markets are less than perfectly efficient is hardly a controversial proposition; indeed, several examples of notable market efficiencies were presented to the Supreme Court this past Term when it considered the continuing vitality to the fraud-on-the-market challenge in Halliburton.  Many of those examples, however, are several years old – which is why it was so amusing for me to see two new instances of dramatic inefficiencies just in the last month.

First, the New York Times published a piece, How Our Taxi Article Happened to Undercut the Efficient Market Hypothesis, explaining how publication of an article on falling medallion prices sent the stock price of Medallion Financial – a company that issues loans secured by taxi medallions – tumbling.  This was surprising because information about taxi medallion prices is public, so the stock should not have been reacted to the news.  Josh Barro, author of both pieces, speculates that the price drop may have occurred because some of the information in his article may have been difficult for investors to obtain, particularly since false information regarding medallion prices had been (inadvertently) circulated by the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission.

(Which, by the way, suggests that courts are correct to be wary of the “truth on the market” hypothesis – the argument often advanced by securities fraud defendants that even if their statements were false, it was canceled out by publicly available truthful information.  In the case of Medallion Financial, the false information apparently dominated over truthful information, at least so long as the truthful information was piecemeal and required effort to gather.)

The second example of market inefficiencies occurred when President Obama announced that the U.S. would be resuming diplomatic ties with Cuba.  The news sent the price of the Herzfeld Caribbean Basin Fund soaring, because that fund invests in companies that stand to benefit from improved diplomatic relations.  It also, apparently, boosted the price of any company that even appeared to be associated with Cuba, including shares of Cuba Beverage, which makes energy drinks and has nothing whatsoever to do with Cuba, the country.  The Wall Street Journal article on the subject offers other examples of similar sorts of investor confusion.

 Also, here is a blue Christmas tree that has been decorated to look like the Cookie Monster:

Seven-inch-blue-christmas-tree

 (x)

Happy holidays!

Over the past few months, I have received a number of e-mails from the alumni associations of each of my two former law firms.  

In theory, I think these alumni networks are good ideas. They could help us keep in touch and could introduce us to people with common ties to those law firms. They could also help the law firms maintain ties with alums who could become clients.  

In practice, however, I rarely use any of the alumni services offered.

One of the main reasons is that my former firms do not have offices where I currently live (in Nashville) and they rarely, if ever, have events here.  If I still lived in Atlanta or New York City, I would probably attend some of the offered alumni CLE events, but I am probably never going to travel for them. 

As to the online alumni networks on the law firms’ websites, I think the contact information for alums probably stays relatively out of date (as people choose to update their information on major social networks, but may forget about the ones at the law firms).  LinkedIn law firm alumni groups are probably the most useful thing that the law firms do, but I find the content posted there is generally not that helpful and can be dominated by some desperate group member salesperson.  (I also think LinkedIn is the least user friendly of the major social networks, but that is a topic for another post). 

What law firm alumni network efforts have you seen be successful? Are they worth the effort that major law firms seem to be putting into them?