SEC Chair Wants Activist Fights to Be Nicer

Among the more interesting ways that law gets made is that sometimes an important person will give a speech, and the speech contains law, and the job for lawyers is to figure out what the speech says. So today Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White gave a speech at the Tulane Corporate Law Institute, the big annual M&A law party, with the grab-bag title "A Few Observations on Shareholders in 2015." There are, in fact, some observations here, for instance about the benefits of shareholder activism, though they tend to be studiously neutral. ("Activism leads to either increased or decreased long-term economic well-being," cool cool.) But my guess is that all the M&A lawyers and bankers didn't fly to New Orleans for observations; they want to know what the SEC is going to do about various activist fights. And White's speech offers a few clues.