Daily Practice

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How Do You Engage When The “Big 3” Have Split in Half?

Now that the last of the “Big 3” institutional investors have announced that they are splitting their stewardship team into two, it’s fair to wonder how this impacts your engagement strategy and scheduling. Engagement sure has changed this year in numerous ways – in fact, Vanguard’s latest engagement survey revealed a 44% decline in the 2nd quarter of 2025 compared to the same period in …

How Analysts and Investors Use AI to Review Earnings Releases

As borne out by a recent study, analysts and investors are increasingly using AI tools to read and analyze earnings reports (10-Ks, 10-Qs, earnings releases and transcripts) to gain faster insights and identify investment opportunities. These tools leverage natural language processing, machine learning and sentiment analysis to extract, interpret and rank relevant data. Here are some of the ways that analysts and investors use AI …

The SEC Offers Shiny Objects (and Data)

Last week, the SEC announced it has a new statistics and data visualization page that is pretty cool. The information is “interactive,” presented in graphics and also can be downloaded. For folks tracking deals, you’ll get this information quarterly: IPOs, follow-on offerings, corporate bond deals and Reg D offerings. You’ll get Reg A offerings on a semi-annual basis. On an annual basis, you’ll get this …

The Biggest Problem With Board Meeting Agendas? They Get Too Routine

The most common problem with board meeting agendas is they get too routine. You pull up the agenda from last year for that particular meeting and it gets a perfunctory look and it’s sent out. Most sets of governance guidelines include a recommendation that the lead director/ board chair gets a bite at the apple and reviews the board agenda. But that often is a …

How Should You Handle ‘Sunny Day/Peace Time’ Shareholder Engagement?

During the proxy season, everyone’s flat out soliciting votes, so investors are jammed up, and they’ll be available for engagement only if there’s something very specific to your annual meeting that’s important enough to them that they’ll pick up the phone. Note that I said “important enough to them.” It might be important to you – but it might not be to them. It’s always …

How to (Appropriately) Use AI to Take Notes

Recently, I blogged about considerations to ponder when deciding which situations are appropriate to use AI to help you take notes. I offered the reasons why it’s never appropriate to use AI to take notes at board and board committee meetings (and I also noted that corporate secretaries should bake AI into their board meeting compliance warnings). But there are plenty of situations where AI …

The Ten Most Common XBRL Errors for Form 10-Ks

Given that the Staff from the SEC’s Division of Economic and Risk Analysis recently had to post this note about errors for XBRL tags on “public float” amounts, I thought I would list the ten most common XBRL errors made by filers of Form 10-Ks, based on observations from the SEC’s DERA staff, Corp Fin staff comment letters and other commentary: 1. Incorrect Tag Selection: …

Independent Board Chairs: Seven Practice Pointers

Recently, the NYSE and JPMorgan released this lengthy “Board Structure and Composition” white paper and Cooley was proud to contribute Chapter 20 “Independent Board Chair – Trends and Issues” chapter (pp. 157–163). Here are seven practice pointers from that: 1. Clarify the Role of the Chair: Define and document the independent chair’s duties in a committee charter, governance guidelines, or board policy to avoid confusion …