Mark D. Wood

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On October 16, the staff of the Division of Corporation Finance (Staff) of the Securities and Exchange Commission issued Staff Legal Bulletin No. 14K (SLB). The SLB provides new guidance regarding the Staff’s views as to when registrants may properly exclude, pursuant to Rule 14a-8(i)(7) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, shareholder proposals under the “ordinary business” exception.…
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On September 26, the Securities and Exchange Commission adopted a new rule to allow all issuers, not just emerging growth companies, to utilize “test-the-waters” communications in connection with an initial public offering or other securities offering.

The rule implements the proposal put forth by the SEC in February 2019, discussed in the March 1, 2019 edition of Corporate & Financial Weekly Digest.…
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The Council of Institutional Investors (CII), an investor advocacy association primarily for pension funds and local governments, has put forth a proposal to amend the Delaware General Corporation Law to limit the ability of publicly-traded Delaware corporations to maintain multi-class common stock voting structures (i.e., high-vote/low-vote stock structures).…
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On August 20, a federal magistrate judge in the Eastern District of New York granted a motion for summary judgment in a derivative case brought against purported 10 percent stockholders of 1-800-Flowers.com, Inc. Pursuant to Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, the judge found a hedge fund liable as a 10 percent owner, despite the fact that it had delegated voting and investment authority to its investment adviser.…
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On August 23, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that, effective October 1, the fees that public companies and other issuers pay to register their securities with the SEC will increase from $121.20 per million dollars to $129.80 per million dollars, an increase of approximately 7.1 percent. This increase in the SEC registration statement filing…

On August 20, the staff of the Division of Corporation Finance (the staff) of the Securities and Exchange Commission released several new Compliance and Disclosure Interpretations (C&DIs) relating to interactive data/eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL), with a focus on items relating to Inline XBRL format requirements.…
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Investment Advisers

On August 21, by a vote of 3 to 2, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued interpretive guidance on an investment adviser’s fiduciary duties with respect to voting of proxies for client accounts. The guidance makes clear that advisers may agree with their clients that the client, and not the adviser, will vote proxies, but such guidance is generally impractical for advisers to private funds and registered investment companies (because there is no practical way to assign voting power to the funds).…
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On August 20, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it had charged Florida-based TherapeuticsMD Inc. with Regulation FD violations stemming from alleged sharing of material non-public information with research analysts without also publicly disclosing the information, in what appears to be the first such Regulation FD enforcement case brought by the SEC in the last six years.…
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On August 8, the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed amendments to modernize the required disclosures under Regulation S-K regarding a company’s business description, legal proceedings and risk factors (the Proposal). The Proposal is part of the Staff’s disclosure effectiveness initiative to improve its disclosure regime for investors and registrants. The Proposal would implement a more principles-based approach with respect to the disclosure rules relating to the registrant’s business description and risk factors. The SEC notes that its aim for using such an approach, as opposed to prescriptive requirements, would be to “elicit more relevant disclosures” about the items because the current requirements “may not reflect what is material to every business.” The following are key elements of the proposed amendments.…
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