Latest Articles

D&O Questionnaires: How In-House Practitioners Must Use Their Judgment

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 …

ISS Benchmark Survey Results Highlight P4P Misalignment Policy

Last week, ISS issued a press release about the results of its latest benchmark survey (here’s the 22-page summary of the results). Nothing earth-shattering this year. We should see this year’s policy updates from ISS next month. Probably the most interesting result from the survey relates to the ratio of performance-based to time-based equity awards in the event of a quantitative pay-for-performance (P4P) misalignment. ISS’ …

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 …

Compensation Issues in M&A: Practice Pointers

Coming up on Wednesday, October 9th is the next episode in our Comp Talks series, during which Cooley’s Rama Padmanabhan and Michael Bergmann – with Ali Murata moderating – will discuss the recent trends, special issues and considerations relating to executive compensation and employee benefits in the context of mergers, acquisitions and similar transformative corporate events. Register now. Here are four practice pointers from Ali …