Cost-Benefit Analysis

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Cost-Benefit Analysis and Third-Party Opinion Practice
     Jonathan C. Lipson, 63(4): 1187–1222 (August 2008)
Practitioner literature and bar association reports frequently exhort lawyers and clients to use "cost-benefit analysis" ("CBA") to answer important questions about third-party closing opinion practice, including whether to have an opinion in a given transaction at all. Yet, this literature rarely considers seriously what is meant by "cost-benefit analysis" or whether it is in fact an appropriate decision tool in this context. This Article fills that gap by examining what CBA can—and cannot—do for third-party closing opinion practice. Among its benefits, CBA should help to orient discussions about whether to have a closing opinion around an opinion's economic and informational value rather than claims that an opinion is (or is not) "traditional" or "market" in a particular context. But CBA is an imperfect tool. Cost-benefit analyses can be manipulated to mask costs or to exaggerate benefits. More fundamentally, CBA may treat ethically questionable practices as cost-justified and may fail to account for certain important professionalizing benefits of closing opinion practice. The Article suggests ways that CBA can and cannot help to improve closing opinion practice.

Financial Innovation and Governance Mechanisms: The Evolution of Decoupling and Transparency
     Henry T. C. Hu; 70(2): 347-406 (Spring 2015)
Financial innovation has fundamental implications for the key substantive and information-based mechanisms of corporate governance. “Decoupling” undermines classic understandings of the allocation of voting rights among shareholders (via, e.g., “empty voting”), the control rights of debtholders (via, e.g., “empty crediting” and “hidden interests”/ “hidden non-interests”), and of takeover practices (via, e.g., “morphable ownership” to avoid section 13(d) disclosure and to avoid triggering certain poison pills). Stock-based compensation, the monitoring of managerial performance, the market for corporate control, and other governance mechanisms dependent on a robust informational predicate and market efficiency are undermined by the transparency challenges posed by financial innovation. The basic approach to information that the SEC has always used—the “descriptive mode,” which relies on “intermediary depictions” of objective reality—is manifestly insufficient to capture highly complex objective realities, such as the realities of major banks heavily involved with derivatives. Ironically, the primary governmental response to such transparency challenges—a new system for public disclosure that became effective in 2013, the first since the establishment of the SEC—also creates difficulties. This new parallel public disclosure system, developed by bank regulators and applicable to major financial institutions, is not directed primarily at the familiar transparency ends of investor protection and market efficiency.

As starting points, this Article offers brief overviews of: (1) the analytical framework developed in 2006−2008 for “decoupling” and its calls for reform; and (2) the analytical framework developed in 2012−2014 reconceptualizing “information” in terms of three “modes” and addressing the two parallel disclosure universes.

As to decoupling, the Article proceeds to analyze some key post- 2008 developments (including the status of efforts at reform) and the road ahead. A detailed analysis is offered as to the landmark December 2012 TELUS opinion in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, involving perhaps the most complicated public example of decoupling to date. The Article discusses recent actions on the part of the Delaware judiciary and legislature, the European Union, and bankruptcy courts—and the pressing need for more action by the SEC. At the time the debt decoupling research was introduced, available evidence as to the phenomenon’s significance was limited. This Article helps address that gap.

As to information, the Article begins by outlining the calls for reform associated with the 2012−2014 analytical framework. With revolutionary advances in computer- and web-related technologies, regulators need no longer rely almost exclusively on the descriptive mode rooted in intermediary depictions. Regulators must also begin to systematically deploy the “transfer mode” rooted in “pure information” and the “hybrid mode” rooted in “moderately pure information.” The Article then shows some of the key ways that the new analytical framework can contribute to the SEC’s comprehensive and long-needed new initiative to address “disclosure effectiveness,” including in “depiction-difficult” contexts completely unrelated to financial innovation (e.g., pension disclosures and high technology companies). The Article concludes with a concise version of the analytical framework’s thesis that the new morphology of public information—consisting of two parallel regulatory universes with divergent ends and means—is unsustainable in the long run and involve certain matters that need statutory resolution. However, certain steps involving coordination among the SEC, the Federal Reserve, and others can be taken in the interim.

An Overview of the General Counsel’s Decision Making on Dispute-Resolution Strategies in Complex Business Transactions
     E. Norman Veasey and Grover C. Brown; 70(2): 407-436 (Spring 2015)
This Article is an overview of the hard choices that face a general counsel (GC) when weighing the pros and cons of whether and when a particular complex business dispute is better suited for litigation in the public courtroom or through a carefully constructed alternate dispute-resolution (ADR) process, including mediation and/or arbitration. Is either choice inherently more expensive, time consuming, or problematic than the other? The obvious answer is that each of these decisions is fact-intensive, dependent on myriad factors, and neither choice is “inherently” better or worse than the other.

We have focused exclusively on complex commercial disputes between businesses and we analyze the issues that would likely be considered by the GC and other corporate decision makers in choosing and navigating the route that provides the best opportunity for optimal results in resolving a domestic or international business dispute. These dispute resolution choices often must be faced in the negotiation of the terms of a business transaction, and thus before there is a dispute.

We explore the pros and cons of how the panoply of dispute-resolution mechanisms may play out down the road. In doing so, we are mindful of the complicated job of the GC in foreseeing at the negotiation stage how the optimal dispute-resolution process should be analyzed and drafted.

We have learned through our experience, current discussions with GCs, and the abundant literature on the subject that there are divergent views about the efficacy of domestic arbitration, in particular. We believe that the bad anecdotal experiences of some general counsel with arbitration should not pre-ordain a generally negative bias. Nor should good experiences dictate a generally positive bias. Like many questions, the common-sense answer is that “it depends.”