Bill’s post concerning the role of lawyers in reducing regulatory costs reminded me that that I had forgotten to post after the recent Harvard Negotiation Law Review Symposium on Deal-Making and Strategic Negotiation (thanks for the invite Vic). I had blogged about the value of case studies for empirical scholarship here. The symposium included some very interesting discussions regarding what might be thought of as unconventional roles for the lawyer, i.e. managing regulatory costs and thinking about branding considerations.

Read the full piece here.

Today’s WSJ reports that professional stock analysts employed by brokerage firms are up to their old sunny ways. These “sell-side” analysts came under fire in 2002 for rendering falsely optimistic trading recommendations. Congressional hearings revealed that during the late 1990s, analysts’ “buy” recommendations outnumbered “sell” recommendations by nearly 100 to one.

Read the full piece here.

Back in February, I criticized the SEC’s rules regarding how energy companies must disclose their oil reserves in securities filings. My main point was that the conservative way the SEC measures reserves is quite different from the measurement approach the oil companies themselves take when deciding how to invest billions of their own dollars.

Read the full piece here.

In today’s W$J, Holman Jenkins stands up for short-sellers, and rightly so. Those folks have taken a bit of a beating lately. They’ve been sued by companies like Biovail and Overstock.com and trashed on talk shows like CBS’s 60 Minutes.

Read the full piece here. 

Today’s W$J reports on an odd lawsuit the Australian government is pursuing against Citigroup. According to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, a smoke break conversation between Citigroup employees resulted in illegal insider trading. Citigroup, it seems, was representing bidder Toll Holdings, Inc. in a yet-to-be-announced hostile bid for Patrick Corp., Austrialia’s largest port cargo handler. Someone from Citigroup’s investment banking operation allegedly shared information about the deal with one of Citigroup’s proprietary traders (i.e., someone who trades securities for Citigroup’s own account). The trading that followed, Australian regulators say, violated the law.

Read the full piece here. 

I’m really starting to worry about the lawyers for former Qwest CEO, Joseph Nacchio. (I first expressed concern here.) Mr. Nacchio has been charged with 42 counts of criminal insider trading. The charges are based on allegations that Mr. Nacchio learned, after Qwest had made some rosy public statements, that business wasn’t going as well as predicted, and he then sold $101 million worth of stock on the basis of that non-public information.

Read the full piece here.

The WSJ this weekend has a long piece on the issue of stock option backdating, “The Perfect Payday.” Here’s the tagline…

Read the full piece here.

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and co-owner of Landmark Theatres, has been blogging about equity-based CEO compensation and the problems it purportedly creates. Cuban’s theory is that paying CEOs in company stock does not tend to align their interests with those of shareholders; instead, it leads CEOs to pursue excessively risky business ventures.

Read the full piece here.

So I’ve been a little absent from the blog lately. Sorry about that. I have a decent excuse.

As our law prof readers know, but others might not, this is prime article submission season. The conventional wisdom is that it’s best your get your article into the hands of newly minted law review editors right after they take over, which usually happens around the first of March. Hence, there’s a mad dash to submit journal articles around this time of year.

Read the full piece here.