Regardless of whether a financial advisor is an “investment advisor” or a “broker” or neither under federal securities laws, the advisor might be an agent of the client under the common law of agency. If so, then as a matter of state law the advisor is a fiduciary who will be subject to liability for breach of any of several fiduciary duties to the client. In a recent paper sponsored by Federated Investors that is available for download here, I examine the fiduciary obligations of financial advisors who are agents under the common law of agency. The paper draws on earlier work on the economic structure of fiduciary law.

The debate about whether to impose a harmonized federal fiduciary standard of conduct on investment advisors and brokers notwithstanding, a financial advisor who is an agent under state agency law is subject to fiduciary duties of loyalty, care, and a host of subsidiary rules that reinforce and give meaning to the broad standards of loyalty and care as applied to specific circumstances. In the event of the advisor’s breach of duty, the client will be entitled to an election among remedies that include compensatory damages to offset losses incurred or to make up gains forgone owing to the breach; disgorgement by the advisor of any profit accruing from the breach or compensation paid by the client; or punitive damages. A financial advisor who ignores the possibility of fiduciary status under state agency law acts at his peril.

…continue reading: Fiduciary Obligations of Financial Advisors Under the Law of Agency

On February 6, 2013, Chancellor Strine of the Delaware Chancery Court issued a bench ruling addressing the duty of independent directors of a Delaware corporation with significant operations or assets outside the United States. In re Puda Coal, Inc. Stockholders Litigation, C.A. No. 6476-CS (Del. Ch. Feb. 6, 2013). In a short but important bench ruling, Chancellor Strine refused to dismiss a breach of fiduciary duty claim against independent directors of a Delaware corporation who had failed to discover the unauthorized sale of assets located in China by the company’s chairman. Importantly, Chancellor Strine’s remarks implicated the duty of loyalty, which creates a risk of personal liability for directors and, potentially, the absence of corporate indemnification. While the facts in the case were somewhat extreme, the ruling in Puda Coal highlights the risks and challenges that may exist for directors of Delaware corporations with significant foreign assets or operations. Although Chancellor Strine recognized that each situation is undoubtedly dependent on its facts and will turn on the nature of the foreign operations, his ruling did include the following remarks:

…continue reading: Independent Director Duties of Delaware Corporations with Foreign Operations

A recent Yale Law Journal article describes a “striking trend in the administration of civil justice in the United States”—“the virtual abandonment of the centuries-old institution of trial.” In recent times, only approximately 1% of federal civil cases end in jury trials. Deep-pocketed companies often settle before trial because they fear that jurors will sympathize with individual plaintiffs and that jurors may lack the patience and ability to weigh complicated evidence. This is especially true for financial institutions in the current public-relations climate. But our recent experience co-defending Goldman Sachs in a five-week jury trial demonstrates that corporate defendants need not avoid juries at all costs, especially where important principles are at stake and there is a strong belief that the claims are baseless.

…continue reading: Lessons from a Jury Trial

As the 2013 proxy season is now underway, companies should be aware of the recent wave of lawsuits alleging breaches of fiduciary duties by management and directors in connection with compensation-related decisions. These suits allege deficient disclosure with respect to compensation-related proxy proposals and seek to enjoin the company’s annual meeting until supplemental disclosures are made. They primarily target proposals to increase the amount of shares reserved for equity compensation plans and advisory votes on executive compensation (say-on-pay). There also have been a handful of suits relating to proposals seeking to amend certificates of incorporation to increase the total number of authorized shares.

More than 20 such cases were filed in 2012, and the plaintiffs’ law firm predominantly initiating these suits has announced that it is investigating nearly 40 additional companies. These cases are typically filed shortly after a company files its definitive proxy statement and make generic accusations of inadequate disclosure. Some companies concerned about potential disruption to their annual meetings have been willing to settle these claims. There have been at least six reported settlements, all involving proposals to increase the number of shares authorized under equity plans. These settlements have generally involved supplemental disclosure and payment of up to $625,000 of plaintiffs’ attorneys’ fees. Other companies have settled prior to the filing of a formal lawsuit. Although a preliminary injunction has been granted in only one of these cases, Knee v. Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., many cases in which preliminary injunctions were denied are still pending resolution regarding other relief requested by the plaintiffs, such as damages. An analysis of the claims made in filed cases to date may help companies decide whether to increase disclosure in their 2013 annual meeting proxy statements.

…continue reading: How to Prepare for Annual Meeting Litigation

I plan to speak about the Enforcement Division’s and in particular the Asset Management Unit’s priorities in the hedge fund space. I’ll discuss the importance of specialization and expertise to this effort; the risks for investors; how these risks are informed by the hedge fund operating model; and how a hedge fund manager’s business may be at odds with the manager’s fiduciary duty to the fund. I’ll also discuss the types of misconduct we’ve seen crossing our desks in the Asset Management Unit, and I’ll conclude with certain best practices to avoid the specter of an enforcement referral or inquiry.

…continue reading: Enforcement Priorities in the Alternative Space

For many employers, underfunded defined benefit pension plans present significant ongoing challenges. These challenges arise not only because of the underfunding itself, but also because of the significant volatility that the underfunding can create on its balance sheet due to changes in interest rates and other key assumptions over time. An employer has always had the ability to seek to improve its longer-term financial profile by “de-risking” its pension plan through the purchase of an annuity from a suitable annuity provider that commits to pay benefits to plan participants without further financial support from the employer. The transfer of pension obligations in this manner, which may include the termination or partial termination of the pension plan, can significantly improve an employer’s financial profile. De-risking transactions have become more prominent in recent months because of two transformative transactions, one involving General Motors and the other involving Verizon. We are pleased to report that the first judicial test of these transactions in court under ERISA, the Federal benefits statute, has resulted in a victory for the parties involved in the transaction. And, while the decision was based only on a request for preliminary injunctive relief, and while future litigation will be based on the manner in which future de-risking transactions are structured (including on the key issue of annuity provider selection and suitability), the decision validates the central thesis of pension de-risking and provides an important and helpful roadmap through some of the potential ERISA challenges to these transactions.

…continue reading: Court Rejects ERISA Challenge to Pension De-Risking Transaction

In the recent decision Gatz Properties LLC v. Auriga Capital Corporation, the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the Delaware Court of Chancery’s January 2012 decision in Auriga Capital Corporation v. Gatz Properties. In January of this year, the Court of Chancery held that a controlling member and manager of a limited liability company breached his fiduciary duties to the company’s minority members because the process by which he purchased the limited liability company from the minority members did not result in the payment of a fair price under the entire fairness standard of review. In affirming the decision, the Supreme Court stated that the question of whether the default standard under the Delaware Limited Liability Company Act is that a manager owes fiduciary duties to the members of a limited liability company remains unanswered and should not have been addressed by the lower court. Until this question is answered definitively, members of limited liability companies should clearly state in the limited liability company agreement whether and to what extent the company’s managers or controlling persons should have any fiduciary duties to the members.

…continue reading: Fiduciary Duties as Default Standard Under Limited Liability Company Act

Earlier in October, Federico Cenzi Venezze and I posted “A Capital Market, Corporate Law Approach to Creditor Conduct” up on SSRN. Michigan Law Review is scheduled to publish the article in their next volume.

In this article, we focus on the problem of creditor conduct in distressed firms — for which policymakers ought to have the economically-sensible repositioning of the distressed firm as a central goal. This problem has vexed courts for decades, without coming to a stable doctrinal resolution. It’s easy to see why developing an appropriate rule here has been difficult to achieve: A rule that facilitates creditor operational intervention going beyond ordinary collection on a defaulted loan can induce creditors to intervene perniciously, to shift value to themselves. But a rule that confines creditors to no more than collecting their debt can allow failed managers to continue mismanaging the distressed firm, with the only real alternative to the failed incumbent management — the creditor — being paralyzed by unclear and inconsistent judicial doctrine.

The article proceeds in four steps. For the first step, we show that existing doctrines do not address themselves to facilitating efficacious management of the failing firms. Yet with corporate and economic volatility as important as ever, courts should seek to make doctrine here more functionally-oriented than it now is.

…continue reading: A Capital Market, Corporate Law Approach to Creditor Conduct

On March 31, 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri awarded plaintiffs more than $35 million in a class action suit over certain breaches of duty related to 401(k) plan expenses.

The case was brought on behalf of participants in two 401(k) plans sponsored by a major manufacturer of power and automation equipment with operations in around 100 countries and more than 135,000 employees.

In Tussey v. ABB, Inc., [1] the District Court held that ABB, Inc. and its benefit and investment committees (collectively, “ABB”) violated their fiduciary duties to the plans when they failed to monitor record-keeping costs, failed to negotiate rebates from investment companies on the plans’ investment platform, selected mutual fund share classes that were more expensive than necessary, and replaced a mutual fund with a fund offered by an affiliate of the record keeper for the plans. In addition, the District Court found that the employer and its benefits committee violated their fiduciary duties to the plans by agreeing to pay the record keeper above market record-keeping fees in order to subsidize other corporate services provided to the employer by the record keeper, such as payroll and record keeping for other employee benefit plans.

…continue reading: Fiduciary Duties to 401(k) Plans

A major reason for the existence of conglomerates or business groups is to create internal capital markets to promote the efficiency of the group. One of many efficiency measures that internal capital markets can offer is an insurance pool, which provides temporary liquidity to the members of the group in the event of adverse shocks.  If mutual fund families, which are a collection of legally independent entities tied together by the sponsoring management company, are regarded as groups, it seems reasonable to assume that there would be a group interest. If so, it seems natural to ask whether insurance pools could exist in these families where cash-rich mutual funds direct capital to family funds that are facing large redemption requests, as these redemptions could lead to large fire sale losses. However, by law, they cannot. This is because, while the provision of such an insurance pool against temporary liquidity shocks benefits the family, the cost is borne by the shareholders of the fund providing this “free” insurance. A mutual fund owes a fiduciary responsibility only to its own shareholders, and not to its family.

In our paper, Conflicting Family Values in Mutual Fund Families, forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, we address whether such insurance pools exist in mutual fund families. We examine this by analyzing the investments of affiliated funds of mutual funds (AFoMFs). AFoMFs are mutual funds that only invest in other mutual funds within the family. Instead of the investors or their financial advisors choosing which mutual funds of the family to invest in, AFoMFs do that for the investors. Virtually non-existent in the 1990s, these funds have become very popular. In 2007, which is the last year of our sample.  Of the 30 large families that made up around 75% of the industry’s assets, 27 had AFoMFs.

…continue reading: Conflicting Family Values in Mutual Fund Families