Plaintiff's Bar -- The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Collectively, they are known as plaintiff's bar. These are the attorneys who gear their practices toward representing plaintiffs in civil litigation. As I see it, they fall into three categories:

• The group who represent plaintiffs in litigation where the plaintiffs in question have clearly been wronged. While it's not where I am going to focus here, consider, for example, the made-up case where plaintiff goes to a restaurant (think Japanese steak house) where the chefs put on a show for their diners. They toss food. They flip spatulas. I have never seen a diner get hurt in one of these situations. But, in this fictional situation, one chef decides to fling diners' food to them on razor sharp knives. One diner gets up to leave because he is frightened and just as he does, a knife flies astray and hits him blade first in the back, seriously injuring him. The restaurant's insurer says that the diner assumed a risk when he sat down at the hibachi grill. I don't have legal training, but the lay person in me thinks he needed an attorney to right this wrong.
• The group who represent plaintiffs who have probably not been wronged, but where there might be a court that will find for plaintiffs and award massive damages. As an example, consider the spate of cash balance plan lawsuits that were filed. Typically, the issue was age discrimination. Whether or not there actually was age discrimination in designs was a matter of opinion. As a group, actuaries are well-trained to opine on this issue. Being one of these actuaries and being one who knows many others, I've not personally found one yet who thinks that cash balance plans are inherently age discriminatory. But, the attorneys filing the suits know that all they need is one big win and the payoff for them will be huge. I disagree with these attorneys, but it is possible that they are right and I am wrong.
• Finally, there is the group who seek out plaintiffs to file lawsuits where there is never any thought of wrongdoing. All they are doing is hoping that defendants will think it is less expensive to settle the lawsuits than to defend them. Since the attorneys in such situations don't, in my opinion, even care if there is any wrongdoing, I view this as the worst of all situations.

Yes, I have an example for you. As regular readers of this blog know, Dodd-Frank and its older brother Sarbanes-Oxley have imposed significant requirements on issuers of proxies to disclose executive compensation. Most companies have worked hard to ensure that their disclosures are, at a minimum, adequate. A meaningful percentage of them have gone above and beyond in their disclosures providing information to shareholders beyond that which is required and providing excellent supporting rationale for their compensation decisions.

So, what's the litigation here?

A group of attorneys made the startling (well not really) discovery that if you could find a way to stop a company from holding its annual shareholder's meeting that all proverbial hell would break loose. I wrote about this here. What they claim is that disclosure of executive compensation in the proxy is inadequate for the shareholder to make an informed decision regarding say-on-pay or some other vote on which their client could weigh in.

We apologize for this brief commercial interruption before returning you to your regular program. In my profession, I work with a lot of people who do understand compensation. Many of them are also shareholders in companies so that they get to cast their votes on these matters. As part of the small group who could actually make sense of these disclosures, how many of them actually take the time to review the executive compensation disclosures in proxies? A very unscientific review of data that I did on this group (this means that I observed, asked a few people and took a guess) suggests that fewer than 10% of this group actually reviews the executive compensation disclosures carefully enough to opine on its reasonableness. Most institutional shareholders outsource the review and even the firms to whom they outsource such review are working far more from checklists than they are from hard analysis of the data.

So, there's no case, right?

That's not the point. A well-timed lawsuit can cause a company problems. Put yourself in the position of a company and decide how you would react when you learn that plaintiffs have gone to court seeking an injunction to prevent you from holding your annual shareholder's meeting (for those even less legally informed than me, this means that a court would prohibit that meeting from taking place). You are probably left with just a few options, all costly and none foolproof:

• Fight the injunction and hope you win
• Settle to make plaintiffs and their attorneys go away, so to speak
• File significantly enhanced disclosures with the SEC and provide them to shareholders on a timely enough basis

The attorneys for plaintiffs are betting that most companies will choose what's behind door number two. That is, they are betting that companies will opt to settle for an amount of money whereby those attorneys will recover their expenses plus perhaps 35%-40% of the remaining settlement. That makes it profitable litigation for those attorneys.

What should companies do?

There is no great answer, but it seems a good tact to prepare for this sort of litigation.

• Enhance your disclosures proactively. That is, make yourself a less vulnerable target. 
• Have a team internally that understands the issues and that can be mobilized to combat the opposition. This should probably be composed of internal people and have outside counsel in the loop.
• Make your disclosures convincing. Describe how you developed your practices and why they are appropriate for your company in your industry and your geography.

And, yes, there is a fourth thing that you can do that some may think is as useful as the first three: hope you don't get sued.