This article popped up from the local paper (home of internet sensation Marilyn Hagerty) serving the area of my prior instituion: 

Committee recommends no liquor license for Rumors bar in Grand Forks

The Grand Forks City Council Service/Safety Committee recommended Tuesday that the city deny a liquor license transfer for Rumors bar in Grand Forks.

The committee originally recommended the full council deny the license earlier this month because of the previous felony charges against Blake Bond, Jamestown, N.D., one of the partners in Sin City LLC, the applicant of the license.

The council then sent the issue back to the committee, but when representatives from Sin City failed to show up at Tuesday’s meeting, the committee voted to recommend denying the license again. . . . .

A quick note for the reporter, who wouldn’t necessarily know this:  LLCs don’t have partners. They have members.  So, the more accurate statement would be that Mr. Bond “is one of the members of Sin City, LLC.”  The North Dakota Limited Liability Company Act definitions provision explains that:

“Member” means a person, with or without voting rights, reflected in the required
records of a limited liability company as the owner of a membership interest in the
limited liability company.

 N.D. Cent. Code 10-32-02 (40). 

As for the LLC members, here’s a hint: it’s probably best not to name your LLC “Sin City, LLC” when you want approval from the council’s Safety Committee and need approval of the full council to get the liquor license you need for your bar.  This is likely to be even less of a good idea when one of your LLC members apparently has prior felony convictions.  It’s also probably best to show up for the council meeting to make your case, too, if the council is willing to listen. 

In this circumstance, it is entirely possible that Sin City, LLC, was formed (about a month ago) without the services of an attorney. I rather hope so.  Although as lawyers we are not necessarily required to opine on entity names or other business decisions, sometimes being a good counselor requires suggesting to one’s client the potential implications of such decisions.  Here, for example, good counsel might have suggested that other naming options might be preferable.

Clients won’t always listen, of course, but it’s worth a shot (no pun intended).

Last week, I had an enjoyable conversation with Joseph Yockey (Iowa) about his new article:  “Does Social Enterprise Law Matter?”  I am glad to see more people entering the social enterprise law conversation and have included the abstract of his interesting new article below: 

Social enterprise laws are sweeping through the nation. Entrepreneurs can now organize under one of several new legal forms, including the “benefit corporation” form. In theory, these options will make it easier for socially minded firms to pursue a double bottom line of profit and public benefit — that is, to do well while doing good.

This Article tests that theory. In asking whether social enterprise laws matter, I find that the answer is yes, but not for the reasons most people think. The traditional rationale for social enterprise laws is that they free managers from the “duty” to put profits ahead of social objectives. But that’s wrong; existing corporate law is already flexible enough to permit most social/economic tradeoffs. However, by drawing on insights from new governance theories of regulation, I argue that social enterprise laws add value in other ways. Specifically, they provide a catalyst for entrepreneurs, investors, and stakeholders to develop the normative framework necessary to sustain an important new business model and asset class. They do so through their signaling power, as well as through their ability to create a focal point that will facilitate self-regulation, capital formation, and the design of standards necessary to govern this complex sector.

The Article thus offers a new way of thinking about social enterprise laws. Rather than simply provide new off-the-rack legal forms, these laws encourage a multi-disciplinary process of norm creation and private engagement. I conclude by offering firms and lawmakers several strategies to reinforce this underlying dynamic.

CVS/Caremark announced, on Feb. 5, 2014, that that the company would cease selling tobacco products in its 7,600 U.S. pharmacies.  Given that the entity estimated that it would lose about $2 billion in revenues from the decision, the world took notice.  CVS has managed the announcement well, and the company has received generally good press about the whole idea.

 Personally, I applaud the decision, both because I think it’s a sensible choice and because I think the board properly exercised its authority to set CVS stores up for long-term success. The company tried to maximize the feel-good story of the decision, but I think that message was tempered by the necessity that CVS explain the profit-seeking role of the decision with the announcement. Clearly, CVS’s counsel read eBay v. Newmark.

The CVS announcement had two components.  First, the media spin – for the aren’t-they-great? response:

“We have about 26,000 pharmacists and nurse practitioners helping patients manage chronic problems like high cholesterol, high blood pressure and heart disease, all of which are linked to smoking,” said Larry J. Merlo, chief executive of CVS. “We came to the decision that cigarettes and providing health care just don’t go together in the same setting.” 

Second, was the business-judgment-rule spin – a/k/a the hey-we’re-not-craigslist-or-Ford statement: 

The decision to exit the tobacco category does not affect the company’s 2014 segment operating profit guidance, 2014 EPS guidance, or the company’s five-year financial projections provided at its December 18th Analyst Day. The company estimates that it will lose approximately $2 billion in revenues on an annual basis from the tobacco shopper, equating to approximately 17 cents per share. Given the anticipated timing for implementation of this change, the impact to 2014 earnings per share is expected to be in the range of 6 to 9 cents per share. The company has identified incremental opportunities that are expected to offset the profitability impact. This decision more closely aligns the company with its patients, clients and health care providers to improve health outcomes while controlling costs and positions the company for continued growth.

Here’s the thing: CVS shouldn’t have to do this second part, in my view, though I would have advised them to because of the recent language used by the Delaware courts.  Unlike some, I still believe in the business judgment rule.  Absent conflicts of interest, fraud, or illegality, CVS should be able to make this decision without further justification.  The court should abstain.  But courts want more.

In eBay v. Newmark, Chancellor Chandler was not satisfied that craigslist was profitable or that the company had achieved market-leading status through its chosen course of operations.  He wanted more:

craigslist’s unique business strategy continues to be successful, even if it does run counter to the strategies used by the titans of online commerce. Thus far, no competing site has been able to dislodge craigslist from its perch atop the pile of most-used online classifieds sites in the United States. craigslist’s lead position is made more enigmatic by the fact that it maintains its dominant market position with small-scale physical and human capital. Perhaps the most mysterious thing about craigslist’s continued success is the fact that craigslist does not expend any great effort seeking to maximize its profits or to monitor its competition or its market share. 

For Chancellor Chandler, and Delaware courts, it was not sufficient that craigslist’s CEO testified “that craigslist’s community service mission ‘is the basis upon which our business success rests. Without that mission, I don’t think this company has the business success it has. It’s an also-ran. I think it’s a footnote.’” Would it have been sufficient if he had said “our profitability” instead of “business success?”  I doubt it. 

As such, CVS had to go further to show where this decision fit within their profit-making scenario.  Chancellor Strine agrees: “I simply indicate that the corporate law requires directors, as a matter of their duty of loyalty, to pursue a good faith strategy to maximize profits for the stockholders.”  Chancellor Strine immediately seeks to soften the blow by stating, “The directors, of course, retain substantial discretion, outside the context of a change of control, to decide how best to achieve that goal and the appropriate time frame for delivering those returns.”  The problem: that’s not really true if you add this philosophy together with eBay, which appears to require “great effort” to maximize profits, or monitor competition or market share, as opposed to pursuing a corporate philosophy that creates and maintains profitability and market leadership.

To be clear, this is not about CSR. This is about director primacy and keeping the courts out of the boardroom as much as possible. I think CVS should be able to decide to drop tobacco if they wish, just as craigslist should be able to decide that it wants to stay profitable and be a market leader forever.  If long-term success, in the board’s judgment, means not selling cigarettes or not monetizing and not taking risks of a boom and bust, they should be able to do that.

Was it essential that Boston Market and Krispy Kreme expand as fast as possible and as seek as much profit at they could in the near term?  I hope not.  The directors are supposed to be in charge and make such decisions, not the shareholders, and not the courts.  The business judgment rule is an abstention doctrine, and courts should stay out of it unless there is a strong indication of a conflict of interest, fraud, or illegality. CVS took the proper steps to minimize the risk of a court intervention. They just shouldn’t have had to justify that decision to anyone but their shareholders at election time. 

The SEC is taking some flak from crowdfunding proponents for its crowdfunding rules. Sherwood Neiss, one of the early proponents of a crowdfunding exemption, has taken the SEC to task, as has Representative Sam Graves, the chair of the House Committee on Small Business. See also this article.

These critics point out, correctly, that the crowdfunding exemption is too expensive and restrictive. The problem is that the critics are aiming at the wrong target. I’m no SEC apologist; I have criticized its approach to small business and the structure of its exemptions on a number of occasions. But, in this case, it’s not the SEC that deserves the blame. It’s Congress.

Almost everything the critics are concerned about originates in the statute itself, not in the SEC’s attempt to implement the statute. I pointed out the many problems with the JOBS Act’s crowdfunding exemption almost 18 months ago. The unnecessary cost, complexity, and liability issues the critics are currently complaining about are statutory problems.

Yes, the SEC has some discretion to change some of the objectionable provisions, but one should hardly expect the SEC, with no experience whatsoever with crowdfunding, to overrule the express requirements adopted by Congress. If anything, as I have pointed out here and here, the SEC is to be commended for cleaning up some of the problems created by the statute. 

The crowdfunding exemption is terribly flawed, but it’s not the SEC’s fault. If you’re looking for someone to blame, Congress is the place to start, particularly the Senate, which is responsible for the substitute language that became the final crowdfunding bill. The crowdfunding exemption needs to be fixed, but it’s Congress that will have to fix it.

I just received notice that Virginia Harper Ho’s article “Of Enterprise Principles & Corporate Groups: Does Corporate Law Reach Human Rights?” has been published in 52 Colum. J. Transnat’l L. 113.  Here is the abstract:

In recent years, a number of international and cross-sectoral initiatives have attempted to respond to the human rights impacts of corporations. Foremost among these is the United Nations’ 2008 “Protect, Respect, and Remedy” Framework and its Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, adopted in March, 2011. The Framework is noteworthy, in part, because it considers the potential intersections of corporate law and human rights. Conventional wisdom, however, maintains that corporate law is largely irrelevant to questions of human rights. It is generally viewed to be enabling, rather than prescriptive, and concerned with private contracting rather than the public interest. From a practical standpoint, human rights impacts often involve conduct by remote affiliates and business partners of vast multinational corporate organizations. Corporate law, in contrast, governs the “internal affairs” of discrete legal entities within a given jurisdiction, each protected by a limited liability shield. Questions of global corporate accountability for human rights practices have therefore been viewed as beyond its reach.

This Article challenges this accepted wisdom by exploring the extent to which corporate law reaches the multinational enterprise. It argues that, notwithstanding the centrality of entity-level principles within corporate law, some dimensions of corporate law in fact extend across the formal internal legal boundaries of the multinational corporation. Although corporate law enforcement mechanisms do not offer direct remedies for victims of human rights violations, corporate law is nonetheless an integral part of the emerging institutional infrastructure supporting the human rights responsibilities of corporations.

If you are a business law professor (or reasonable facsimile thereof) and would like to guest-blog with us here at the Business Law Prof Blog, please drop me a line at spadfie@uakron.edu.

14 UST logo (2)

On April 24, 2014, the University of Saint Thomas (Minnesota) will host a conference on social enterprise.  The conference will be interdisciplinary, engaging experts in Catholic studies, entrepreneurship, law, management, and public policy.

The first session will address issues surrounding using business as an agent for social change, with a focus on social entrepreneurship and benefit corporations.  The first session will run from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. in the Atrium at the University of St. Thomas, School of Law and is approved for 2.0 hours of CLE credit (Minnesota).  Speakers are listed below:

  • Elizabeth K. Babson, Attorney with Drinker, Biddle and Reath LLP and a co-author of the Benefit Corporation White Paper
  • Lyman P. Q. Johnson, LeJeune Distinguished Chair in Law, University of St. Thomas, School of Law, and Robert O. Bentley Professor of Law at Washington and Lee University
  • John F. McVea, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship, University of St. Thomas, Opus College of Business
  • J. Haskell Murray, Assistant Professor of Management and Business Law, Belmont University
  • Michael J. Naughton, Director, John A. Ryan Institute for Catholic Social Thought, University of St. Thomas, Center for Catholic Studies
  • Elizabeth R. Schiltz (moderator), Thomas J. Abood Research Scholar, and Co-Director of the Terrence J. Murphy Institute for Catholic Thought, Law and Public Policy, University of St. Thomas, School of Law

The second session will run from 5:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. in the Opus Hall of the Opus College of Business, will include dinner, and the discussion will focus on PoveryCure (a video series by Michael M. Miller of the Acton Institute). 

The sponsors from the University of St. Thomas include:

Advanced registration is required, but the conference is free of charge and open to the public.  Register here. 

More information about the conference can be found here and here.

One of my favorite professors/bloggers, Mike Koehler has an interesting post describing how and why the former DOJ FCPA Enforcement Chief criticized the SEC’s handling of the FCPA. I used to read Mike’s blog daily during my in-house days, and I share his views on the FCPA enforcement regime. 

His post is below and reiterates what I wrote about here about the number of enforcement officers who leave office and question the way in which the FCPA is prosecuted:

This post has a similar theme to this prior post.  The theme is – all one has to do is wait for former DOJ and SEC FCPA enforcement officials to blast various aspects of the current FCPA enforcement climate. Touching upon the same issues I first highlighted in this August 2012 post titled “The Dilution of FCPA Enforcement Has Reached a New Level With the SEC’s Enforcement Action Against Oracle,” as well as prior posts here, here and here, a former Assistant Chief of the DOJ’s FCPA Unit (William Stuckwisch – currently a partner at Kirkland & Ellis) blasts certain aspects of SEC FCPA enforcement inthis recent article published in Criminal Justice.

The article begins:

“Imagine the following scenario: You have guided your client, a publicly traded company, through the long and winding process that is a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) internal investigation. Afterward, or increasingly more often simultaneously, you then lead your client through presentation of the results of the investigation to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) (collectively, “government”). Ultimately, neither the internal investigation nor the government’s investigation finds any improper payment (or offers of payments) to any foreign official, or any other knowing misconduct. As a result, the government cannot pursue substantive FCPA antibribery charges against your client, and the DOJ cannot pursue any other FCPA-related criminal charges. Just when you begin to savor this significant success, you are ripped back to reality, as the SEC informs you that, nevertheless, your client faces civil enforcement under the FCPA’s internal controls provision and demands a significant penalty.  Unfortunately, this scenario is not a hypothetical for the FCPA Bar to deliberate at conferences and include as footnotes in memoranda addressing real-world client issues. Instead, it mirrors the facts publicly alleged in the SEC’s August 2012 enforcement action against Oracle Corporation, a case considered by many FCPA practitioners to be a stunning result.  […]  In Oracle, the SEC faulted the US parent corporation for not auditing local distributors hired by its Indian subsidiary, without alleging that the distributors (or anyone else) had made any improper payment to any foreign government official.  Oracle is the latest example of the SEC’s expansive enforcement of the FCPA’s internal controls provision, and it potentially paints a bleak picture—one in which the provision is essentially enforced as a strict liability statute that means whatever the SEC says it means (after the fact).”

Elsewhere, Stuckwisch, the lead author of the article, notes:

“[G]iven the highly subjective nature of the internal controls provisions, companies will continue to feel at the SEC’s mercy once it opens an FCPA investigation, even if no improper payments (or offers of payments) are ever found.”  […]  In our view, the true lesson of Oracle is not that this particular type of internal control is required, but rather that the internal controls provision is so broad, and the statutory standard of reasonable assurances so subjective, that the SEC has an almost unfettered ability to insist on a settlement, including a civil penalty, at the conclusion of virtually any FCPA investigation. Companies may be willing to enter into such settlements—particularly because, in the absence of a parallel DOJ action, they need not make any factual admissions (due to the “neither admit nor deny” nature of SEC settlements in such circumstances), and the cost of a settlement is often lower than continuing investigative and representative costs. But such settlements can have severe, unintended consequences. Perhaps most significantly, these settlements can lead other companies to misdirect their scarce compliance resources.”

Stuckwisch’s final observation is of course spot-on and generally restates the thesis from my 2010 article “The Facade of FCPA Enforcement.“

 

If you practiced as a transactional attorney before law teaching, chances are that you looked at form agreements provided in treatises, saved on your law firm database, handed to you by partners from past deals, or saved in your own template archives.  This is no different from what litigators do either—they look for model existing memos, complaints, document requests, etc. that guide the first draft and let you start somewhere past “zero”.  The rapidly changing legal environment and unique needs of each client in each deal limits the shelf life of form agreements and saddles them with all sort of potential downsides if they aren’t used thoughtfully, verified by research, or tailored to the specific deal.  This disclaimer aside, I am curious about how we teach students about the role of exemplars, and as a starting point, where to find exemplars.  Students and junior attorneys, if not given the right tools to find the best models, will use bad model forms.  If you don’t believe me, see what you get when you search for “standard asset purchase agreement”. 

This raises the question of where should students, attorneys, law professors wanting to incorporate experiential learning exercise modules into their courses look for these resources. 

 This post will be the first in a series that will highlight these resources.  If you have suggestions for a source, please leave a comment or email me at amtucker@gsu.edu.  I will compile a list of sources and link a word document in the final post.  If there is interest, I will be happy to update the list over time.  For now, the first installment of free, publically available resources.  Paid sources will be next.

-Anne Tucker

Right? 

I understand that I may be one of the few people who seems to actually care about such a thing, but it seems to me courts really should be careful about their descriptions of limited liability entities.  I have written about this before (here, here, and here), but it continues to frustrate me.  

One of the things that got me thinking about this again (but let’s be honest, it seems I am always thinking about this) is a post over at The Conglomerate.  There, Christine Hurt (who, to be clear, is a lot smarter and more knowledgeable than I) discusses the Illinois governor’s interest in generating more jobs by shifting to “the $39 limited liability company.”  In her post, she makes a couple references to incorporation in the context of LLC formation.  But, in fairness, that’s a blog post, and I can’t claim that I have always been as precise as I should be in my blog writing, either.  

Courts, however, should be more careful.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, for example, loves to call limited liability companies “limited liability corporations” in their cases.  Take, for example, CarePartners, LLC v. Lashway, 545 F.3d 867 (9th Cir. 2008), the caption of which is:  “CAREPARTNERS LLC, limited liability corporation under the Laws of the State of Washington doing business as Alderwood Assisted Living . . . .”  That is wrong. Washington LLC law provides that an LLC is a limited liability company.  Even more significant, Washington LLC law provides specifically that  an LLC’s name “[m]ust not contain any of the words or phrases:  . . . ‘corporation,’ ‘incorporated,’ or the abbreviations ‘corp.,’ ‘ltd.,” or ‘inc.,’  . . . .” Wash. Stat. 25.15.010(d)  (2014).  

A quick search of Westlaw provides ten more cases using the term “limited liability corporation” in reference to an LLC since January 23, 2014.  Maybe it doesn’t matter much in most cases, but in cases dealing with new issues under LLC law, it sure can (see, e.g., here).   And until courts start getting more precise, from time to time I’ll keep reporting on their lack of precision.