Sky Blog
On May 23, Target Corp. reached a record $18.5 million settlement with 47 states and the District of Columbia to end investigations into Target’s data breach in 2013. The settlement highlights the growing list of specific measures that companies are …
Recently in In re Cyan, Inc. Stockholders Litigation, the Delaware Court of Chancery dismissed a fiduciary duty claim and a request for a quasi-appraisal remedy in connection with the acquisition of Cyan, Inc. by Ciena Corporation. Relying on principles of …
The Brexit vote and President Donald Trump’s election and proposed regulatory and other reforms have led to worldwide geopolitical uncertainty. We expect reporting companies will continue to disclose risk factors relating to these events in their quarterly and annual filings …
The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) final rule significantly expanding when a person is considered to be a fiduciary under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and the Internal Revenue Code (Code) as a result of providing …
Law is full of vague standards, legally relevant facts are frequently unclear, sanctions and damages are often uncertain, and the likelihood of detection is rarely known precisely. In our forthcoming paper, we ask how these sources of uncertainty, common in …
Previous research on shareholder voting has placed most of the emphasis on the role of institutional shareholders. In our recent study, however, we provide evidence that managers strategically rely on the support offered by retail shareholders to ensure that their …
The U.S. Supreme Court will soon decide an unusual, yet important, case brought by investors in bonds issued by Lehman Brothers, the infamous investment bank that collapsed in September 2008. The case, CalPERS v. ANZ Securities, Inc., is not …
In In re Massey Energy Company Derivative and Class Action Litigation, the Delaware Court of Chancery recently dismissed shareholders’ derivative and putative direct claims alleging that Massey’s former directors and officers caused the company to willfully disregard safety regulations. …
Delaware law provides important tools for directors to maintain control of derivative lawsuits.1 One such tool is the “demand requirement” embodied in Court of Chancery Rule 23.1, which requires that before a stockholder acts on behalf of the corporation, …
Notwithstanding decidedly hostile testimony last month from this humble columnist,[1] the U.S. House of Representatives will soon pass legislation (probably on a strict party-line basis) entitled, “The Financial CHOICE Act of 2017” (H.R. 10) (which acronym stands for “Creating …
Society imposes legal requirements on businesses (issuers) when they offer or sell their securities to investors. These rules governing capital formation are generated both at the federal and state levels. State securities rules are generally referred to as “state blue …
Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee, led by Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), approved their “Financial CHOICE Act” (FCA) legislation on a party-line 34-26 vote on May 4, clearing the way for consideration on the House floor in the coming …
On April 21, 2017, President Trump signed two presidential memoranda calling for review of portions of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 (the “Dodd-Frank Act”). These presidential memoranda follow the executive order signed on February …
Thank you for the kind introduction. I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak at this financial reporting conference for the second time.
Before I continue, let me remind you that the views expressed today are my own and not necessarily …
In his May 5 post, available here, Stanislav Dolgopolov states that the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent settlement with Citadel “undermines the so-called ‘Berkeley Study’ which concluded that off-exchange market makers can neither profitably engage in data feed arbitrage …
The Delaware Supreme Court’s decision in Corwin v. KKR Financial Holdings LLC set a high bar for plaintiff stockholders seeking to challenge public company mergers. Assuming a transaction that is not subject to entire fairness review was approved …
The recent settlement between the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) and Citadel Securities[1] is a landmark in the market structure enforcement program. In a nutshell, the regulators targeted high-speed algorithms that opportunistically used different market data benchmarks and …
Merritt Fox, Zohar Goshen, and Eric Talley were among the authors of three of the 10 best corporate and securities articles last year, the Corporate Practice Commentator has announced. The Columbia Law School professors were joined by Gabriel Rauterberg, who …
Three pending cases – United States v. Martoma, and the habeas corpus cases Gupta v. United States and Whitman v. United States[1] – will allow the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to examine United States …
We can learn a lot from the evolution of smartphones as we try to envisage where the fintech ecosystem–and banks’ role within it–might be heading in the future. Smartphones have ushered in an age when different companies can easily work …