Welcome to the first Annual Benesch Corporate Governance Report focused on trends and best practices at mid-market public companies. While we have seen many reports focused on corporate governance practices of Fortune 100 companies, we wanted to prepare a report for mid-market public companies. Mid-market companies can benchmark their governance practices against this report’s findings. We evaluated those governance practices that are the focus of ISS and Glass Lewis, for example, what ISS evaluates when calculating a company's governance score. Behind our published report is a database we created and analyzed, which allowed us to drill down into specific topics disclosed by companies included in this report.

While we did not anticipate significantly different practices among our universe as compared to Fortune 100 companies, we expected some. We discuss these differences in our report. In addition, we think it will be interesting to see trends develop among our universe, including how quickly “newer” best practices are adopted. As a result, we expect our survey to provide additional insights as we continue to evaluate these and other corporate governance topics over the coming years.