The Securities and Exchange Commission has expanded the confidential filing options, including...more
On March 3, 2025, the Division of Corporation Finance (the “Division”) of the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) issued new guidance, effective immediately, significantly expanding the ability of companies to...more
But apparently there’s one looming—serious enough to cause Corp Fin to issue its now-standard shutdown announcement. The shutdown deadline is Friday night, and apparently there’s currently an impasse over farm aid. Corp Fin’s...more
Demand for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) is rapidly growing across the decentralized finance (DeFi) community, with growing interest among existing crypto-native participants and across the traditional finance industry...more
Publicly traded companies generally file registration statements on Form S-8 to register the offering of the company’s stock pursuant to the company’s equity incentive plans under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended...more
In a monumental decision that will likely have substantial ramifications for crypto industry developers, securities practitioners, and millions of investors and token purchasers alike, on July 13, 2023, the U.S. District...more
A unanimous Supreme Court has confirmed that a claim brought under section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933 ("1933 Act") requires that a plaintiff plead and prove that the shares purchased were issued pursuant to an allegedly...more
In Slack Technologies, LLC v. Pirani, No. 22-200, 2023 U.S. LEXIS 2301 (U.S. June 1, 2023), the Supreme Court of the United States (Gorsuch, J.) held that Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933 (the “Securities Act”), 15...more
The unanimous opinion requires shareholder plaintiffs to plead and prove that they purchased shares traceable to an allegedly false or misleading registration statement. On June 1, 2023, the US Supreme Court issued its...more
Today, the Supreme Court of the United States issued three decisions: Glacier Northwest, Inc. v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local Union, No. 174, No. 21-1449: This case involved the preemptive force of...more
The U.S. Supreme Court held that purchasers of shares sold to the public through a direct listing cannot sue under Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933 unless they can trace their shares to an allegedly defective...more
The US Supreme Court recently agreed to hear an important appeal of a US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decision interpreting Sections 11 and 12(a)(2) of the Securities Act of 1933 in the context of a direct stock...more
In the first published decision of a court of appeal outside Delaware, on April 28, 2022, the California Court of Appeal in Wong v. Restoration Robotics, Case No. A161489, affirmed the trial court’s decision to enforce a...more
On September 20, 2021, in Pirani v. Slack Technologies, Inc., a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that investors who purchase stock in a “direct listing”—in which pre-existing shares are...more
The decision appears to create a new rule for determining standing to bring Securities Act claims in the context of direct listings. The Slack Direct Listing Decision - On September 20, 2021, the US Court of Appeals...more
One of the most significant differences between bringing a securities lawsuit in state versus federal court is the application of the mandatory discovery stay set forth in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (the...more
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) proposed amendments that would ease restrictions on compensatory securities offerings to employees and other service providers under Rule 701 and Form S-8, both...more
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on November 2, 2020, adopted a set of amendments to simplify and improve the exempt offering framework. The amendments are designed to make it easier for issuers to access the...more
A California court ruled that a forum selection provision in a Delaware company’s registration statement requiring that certain securities litigation be brought solely in federal court was enforceable. Wong v. Restoration...more
Federal court grants summary judgment to the SEC on its claim that sales of digital tokens constitute investment contracts under the Securities Act. On September 30, 2020, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein granted...more
The Securities and Exchange Commission has adopted the third group of amendments to its disclosure requirements, originally proposed in August 2019 and discussed in an earlier Goodwin client alert. The amendments, which are...more
The SEC announced last week that in light of COVID-19 concerns, the Division of Corporation Finance is providing a temporary secure file transfer process for the submission of (i) supplemental materials that are requested by...more
Many of us have previously heard the expression that there is a fine line between fact and fiction. In securities law that holds especially true where companies that risk walking the “fine line” in their registration...more
In Jensen v. iShares Trust, 2020 Cal. App. LEXIS 61 (Cal. App. Jan. 23, 2020), a rare state court decision addressing claims under the Securities Act of 1933 (“1933 Act”), the California Court of Appeal rejected...more
On January 21, 2020, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (the “Trust”) became the first digital currency investment vehicle to attain the status of an SEC reporting company. The Trust’s sponsor, Grayscale Investments, LLC (“Grayscale”),...more