Should Your Company Take a Stand on Political and Social Issues?
Why Every Day Is Proxy Season for Public Companies
Corporate Law Report - Office Party Holiday Risks, Human Trafficking, the Fiscal Cliff, More
Both investors and companies are maturing in how they view critical issues raised at the corporate ballot box. Even amid a proxy season that included “the priciest shareholder fight ever,” according to The Wall Street...more
Shareholder proposals submitted for 2024 annual meetings continued to cover a wide range of environmental, social and governance (ESG) topics. And companies seeking to exclude shareholder proposals they deemed inappropriate...more
Welcome to the latest edition of Fenwick’s Securities Law Update....more
You may recall that, in January, ExxonMobil filed a lawsuit against Arjuna Capital, LLC and Follow This, the two proponents of a climate-related shareholder proposal submitted to Exxon, seeking a declaratory judgment that it...more
As we enter the 2024 proxy season, public companies should consider a number of key disclosure and governance matters. Below is a high-level summary of applicable rule changes, guidance, and disclosure considerations for the...more
Pursuant to rules that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued in late 2022, publicly traded companies must generally provide both tabular and narrative and/or graphical disclosure of the relationship between...more
Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and Glass Lewis, the two most influential proxy advisory firms, recently released updates to their voting policies for the 2024 proxy season. The ISS US policy update will apply for...more
Companies have important decisions to make as they prepare for the 2024 annual meeting and reporting season. We have compiled this overview of the latest key issues — including SEC disclosure requirements, SEC guidance,...more
On November 16, 2023, proxy advisory firm Glass Lewis released its 2024 Proxy Voting Policy Guidelines. The new guidelines apply to shareholder meetings occurring after January 1, 2024. Unsurprisingly, many of Glass Lewis’s...more
Broadly considered, stockholder activism has been a significant phenomenon among the largest U.S. public companies, with activists of a variety of stripes waging campaigns on a wide range of issues including in the form of...more
Following a tumultuous 2022 shareholder proposal no-action letter season, the 2023 season contained fewer surprises from the Staff of the Division of Corporation Finance (Staff) of the Securities and Exchange Commission...more
Despite a slowdown in M&A activity and macroeconomic headwinds, stockholder activism remains a potentially powerful tool for investors aiming to extract value from companies. The activism landscape continues to evolve as new...more
In recent years, there has been a steady increase in shareholder proposals that target a public company’s ESG commitments, including diversity and inclusion data, environmental or emission programs, and community engagement....more
On November 15, 2022, Skadden held a webinar titled “Preparing for the 2023 Shareholder Proposal Season.” The panelists were Gianna McCarthy, Director of Corporate Governance for the New York State Common Retirement Fund (NYS...more
This comprehensive report includes five-year trend data, covering the 2018-2022 proxy seasons, for annual meeting participation, director elections, say-on-pay and other proposals among the technology and life sciences...more
As companies prepare for the 2023 proxy season, their ESG performance, as evaluated and rated by various third-party ratings providers, is a key focus. With the growing importance of ESG to institutional investors,...more
Companies are responding in a myriad of ways to the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (Dobbs), including by expanding healthcare travel benefits to reduce barriers to accessing care in...more
This proxy season, companies saw more shareholder proposals than in the past, a change that has been widely attributed to actions by the SEC and its Division of Corporation Finance that had the effect of making exclusion of...more
ESG-related shareholder proposals featured prominently in the most recent proxy season, with nearly 40% of large-cap public companies facing a shareholder vote on ESG topics in the last six months. We reviewed ESG-related...more
On July 13, 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") proposed amendments to Rule 14a-8 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the shareholder proposal rule.1 The proposed amendments would revise three of the...more
On July 13, 2022, by a 3-2 party-line vote, the SEC proposed amendments to Rule 14a-8 to modify three of the existing bases for the exclusion of shareholder proposals from a company’s proxy statement, namely: ,,The...more
On July 13, 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) proposed revisions to Rule 14a-8 under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to amend certain substantive bases on which U.S. public companies can exclude...more
Over the better part of two decades, the SEC has been narrowing the bases for excluding shareholder proposals, resulting in greater access to proxy statements for shareholders to force a vote on a wide array of topics,...more
The US Securities and Exchange Commission on July 13 proposed amendments to the shareholder proposal rule, which governs the process for including or excluding a shareholder proposal in a company’s proxy statement....more
[This post revises and updates my earlier post on this topic primarily to reflect the contents of the proposing release.] At an open meeting last week, the SEC voted, three to two, to propose new amendments to Rule...more