The following post comes to us from John J. Madden, Of Counsel and member of the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Shearman & Sterling LLP, and is based on an article that first appeared in Directors & Boards.
When we convened our Corporate Governance Symposium last year (October 2012), we highlighted the increasingly important role shareholders were playing in the corporate decision-making process, commenting as follows:
“Over the course of the past year, we have continued to see shareholders making their voices heard, in some cases rather forcefully and effectively, on a broad range of corporate issues. In many ways, the recent developments in corporate governance reinforce the growing perception that we are, and have been for several years, experiencing a potentially fundamental shift in the balance of authority, or influence, between boards of directors and shareholders in the corporate decision-making process, moving further away from the longstanding board primacy model of corporate governance.”