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The rise of founder-led, venture capital-backed companies in recent years has coincided with a surge of companies implementing dual-class share structures in connection with their initial public offerings. A dual-class structure typically entitles the holders of one class of the company’s common stock (often designated as Class B common stock) to multiple votes per share and the class of common stock...

SPAC activity continued to slow in the first half of 2022, a sharp decline from the number of deals and IPOs in the same period in 2021. Redemption rates soared, and a record number of SPAC deals were terminated. Factors contributing to the slowdown include disappointing performance by newly de-SPACed companies, rising inflation, macroeconomic uncertainty and increased regulatory scrutiny from the...

Mary Ann Deignan is Managing Director; Rich Thomas is Managing Director and Head of European Shareholder Advisory; and Christopher Couvelier is Managing Director at Lazard. This post is based on a Lazard memorandum by Ms. Deignan, Mr. Thomas, Mr. Couvelier, Emel Kayihan, Antonin Deslandes, and Leah Friedman. Related research from the Program on Corporate Governance includes The Long-Term Effects...

With Labor Day marking the unofficial end of summer, FTI Consulting’s Activism and M&A Solutions team welcomes readers to our eleventh edition of the quarterly Activism Vulnerability Report, which reports the results of our Activism Vulnerability Screener following 2Q22, plus other notable trends and themes in the world of shareholder activism. During 2Q22, the U.S. stock markets experienced...

As predicted in our previous M&A report, 2022 has not lived up to the runaway performance of 2021. As activity—still at impressive levels considering everything that has been thrown at the deal market—takes a breather, we consider five fundamental trends that may play out over the coming months. 1. Rates and financing costs to increase The increasing interest rate environment has, and will...

This post outlines the major trends occurring globally amongst activist investors’ portfolios. Using a proprietary model quantifying criteria such as reputation, number of campaigns/outcomes, tactics/focus, board seats won, and recency of engagements we have produced the Morrow Sodali Top 40 Activists (MS40) list narrowed down from the pool of global investors. The MS40 is compiled across two tiers...

Carve-out deals, whether conducted through a trade sale, buyout, or IPO, have become a vital tool for businesses to boost balance sheets and deliver shareholder value. This trend has gathered momentum over recent years, with 9,155 carve-outs worth US$2.3 trillion in aggregate announced globally in 2021, according to Dealogic—up 67% in value compared to 2020. So far in 2022, carve-out activity has...

Introduction The SEC rule requiring a universal proxy card in director election proxy fights becomes effective today. The resurgence of activism is already in progress, and the universal proxy card may significantly facilitate some proxy contests in which an activist is seeking to elect one or more directors to a company’s board to replace incumbent(s). It will also affect proxy contest strategies,...

Dimensional’s recent paper The Economics of Corporate Governance provides a concise overview of the corporate governance literature. We focus on the governance of for-profit, publicly traded corporations and address two important questions. First, for whom should such corporations be run, shareholders or stakeholders? Second, what is the impact of governance provisions on shareholder value? We...

The American Law Institute (ALI) is currently working on a Restatement of the Law of Corporate Governance (“Restatement”). As with all Restatements, the purpose of the proposed Restatement is to clarify “the underlying principles of the common law” that have “become obscured by the ever-growing mass of decisions in the many different jurisdictions, state and federal, within the United...