Over the past few years the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) have finally started making serious efforts at enforcing the United States' anti-bribery laws against corporations. These efforts will not be effective against the worst offenders, however, if they...

Under traditional agency law doctrine, employees are agents of their employers and owe an agent's concomitant fiduciary duties. Employers, in turn, are merely principals and have no corresponding fiduciary duties. A new wave of thinking has unsettled this approach by concluding that only...

In the public debate over international finance and its operation, an important dimension has been missed. The focus has been on international financial standards and their nature as "soft law". but this discourse ignores profoundly different patterns of legal thought cutting across national...

This Article offers an innovative, cross-field analysis of how control over decision making is established and regulated within private legal organizations, focusing on business corporations, residential community associations, and labor unions. While diverging in their historical origins,...

An important set of contract terms manages potential disputes. In a detailed, hand-coded sample of mergers and acquisition (M&A) contracts from 2007 and 2008, dispute management provisions in correlate strongly with target ownership, state of incorporation, and industry, and with the experience...

In a hand-coded sample of M&A contracts from 2007-08, risk allocation provisions exhibit wide variation. Earn-outs are the least common means to allocate risk, indemnities are most common, followed by price adjustment clauses. Techniques for mitigating enforcement costs – escrows, holdbacks,...

Ownership dispersion is a first-order determinant of M&A practices. Firms with dispersed ownership are more salient, and tend to be larger, but dispersion varies significantly among even large US businesses, and affects M&A deal size, duration, techniques, contract terms, and outcomes. These...

Over 20 years, M&A contracts have more than doubled in size – from 35 to 88 single-spaced pages in this paper's font. They have also grown significantly in linguistic complexity – from post-graduate “grade 20” to post-doctoral “grade 30”. A substantial portion (lower bound ~20%) of...

An important set of contract terms manages potential disputes. In a detailed, hand-coded sample of mergers and acquisition (M&A) contracts from 2007 and 2008, dispute management provisions correlate strongly with target ownership, state of incorporation, and industry, and with the experience of...

During 2008 and 2009 Australian listed entities raised large amounts of equity capital as the global financial crisis led to a significant tightening in credit markets. Over these two years listed entity after listed entity recapitalised, seeking additional equity to replace debt as lenders,...