There are two competing theories of how companies should be governed; one says that management should have a lot of leeway to do what it thinks is best and shareholders should keep quiet and, if they’re unhappy, maybe sell their shares; the other says that shareholders own the company and anything that stands in the way of their replacing inept or corrupt management is bad. The pro-shareholder side has I guess been having a good run lately, what with Chesapeake bowing to Carl Icahn’s demands to be less evil, and with the performance of the Facebook IPO giving evil governance a bad name, but the let’s-say-anti-shareholder position is pretty well entrenched. And the leading exponents, or at least my favorite exponents,* of that view are the law firm of Wachtell Lipton, which invented the poison pill so that managers wouldn’t have to lose their jobs just because someone else wanted to buy their company and their shareholders wanted to sell it.

So let’s say you’re a CEO, and you want to buy a company, and you negotiate to buy that company for stock so your shareholders have to approve the merger. And let’s say juuuuuust hypothetically that, after you agree on the deal and mail the proxies and set up the vote and are about to complete your grand plan, you find out that the company you’re buying is sort of a piece of shit, and that you didn’t know that when you agreed to buy it. Embarrassing for you. What do you do?

Well presumably you ask your lawyers and when those lawyers happen to be Wachtell Lipton they tell you their favorite thing to tell you, which is, “you have lots of options but FOR GOD’S SAKE LEAVE THE SHAREHOLDERS OUT OF IT.” And if you were Ken Lewis in late November / early December 2008, that’s what you did. You can read here his [new lawyers'] defense of his decision not to tell Bank of America shareholders that Merrill had some massive upcoming losses before they voted to approve the acquisition of Merrill; it basically goes like this: Read more »