The New York Times published on Sunday an article on the work of the Shareholder Rights Project (SRP). The article, entitled New Momentum for Change in Corporate Board Elections, was written by New York Times columnist Gretchen Morgenson.
Based on a review of the SRP’s results and interviews with the SRP’s clients and the Director of the SRP, the article discusses the benefits produced by the SRP’s work. The article begins with the observation that “shareholder efforts that actually succeed in changing dubious corporate governance policies are so rare that when they happen, it makes you sit up and take notice;” and concludes that “[c]learly, the shareholder project is having a positive effect.” The article expresses the hope that “mutual funds would join this bandwagon or construct their own,” and suggests that “[t]he Shareholder Rights Project is a model they might want to emulate.”
The SRP is a clinical program operating at Harvard Law School. The SRP works on behalf of public pension funds and charitable organizations seeking to improve corporate governance at publicly traded companies, as well as on research and policy projects related to corporate governance.
The New York Times article stresses that the work of the SRP and its clients during the 2012 and 2013 proxy seasons has produced a large number of board declassifications at large publicly traded firms, moving these companies to annual elections for directors. The article further notes that “[a] far better approach for holding directors accountable, according to a significant body of academic research, is to make them stand for election annually.”