It’s that time of year. Time to dust off your D&O questionnaire and figure out what to do now for the upcoming proxy season. The D&O questionnaire is an important part of the proxy drafting process. When I joined Cooley, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we have our own electronic D&O questionnaire product – Cooley D+O. I was talking with Luci Altman …
How Do You Know Who to Engage With?
Who makes the voting decision at a particular investor can vary. For the larger investors, they tend to have stewardship teams who vote and handle engagements – and that is straightforward. Sometimes stewardship teams are referred to as proxy committees. Beyond that, it can be tricky and take experience to learn how each investor operates and who are the players. You could have an active …
In-House Voices: Effective Shareholder Engagement Practices
We’ve polled some of our in-house friends – and here’s what they say works best when engaging with shareholders:
Digging Into Corp Fin’s Annual Shareholder Proposal Stakeholder Meeting
Last week, Cooley’s Reid Hooper attended the annual meeting of shareholder proposal stakeholders that Corp Fin hosts. Here are a few facts to help you glean some information about these meetings from Reid, who has been an active participant in them for many years:
What Do the Vanguard Pass-Through Voting Pilot Results Mean?
A lot of people are talking about the results recently posted by Vanguard from the first year of its pass-through voting pilot program. Many understandably want to read the tea leaves as indicating that “investor choice” voting on a widespread scale could alter the dynamics of the proxy season. Did the results surprise me? Overall, I don’t think so. I’m not convinced that they look …
Ten Shareholder Proposal Trends Gleaned From the Latest Proxy Season
Here are 10 bullets you can tell your senior management team and board based on lessons learned about shareholder proposals from this proxy season (hat tip to Proxy Analytics’ Steve Pantina for his help with these):