The long-standing and traditional view is that corporations’ objectives should be to maximize shareholder value. More recently, a variety of commentators and observers have argued that corporations have larger social responsibilities. However, as discussed in the following guest post from Eric C. Scheiner and Jennifer Quinn Broda, efforts by companies to fulfil corporate social responsibilities may involve their own risks and even result in D&O claims. By the same token, failing to take action could result in claims as well. These trends have important implications for insurers and for policyholders alike. Eric is a Partner and Jennifer is Of Counsel in the Chicago office of Kennedys. I would like to thank Eric and Jennifer for allowing me to publish their article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this blog’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Eric’s and Jennifer’s article. Continue Reading Guest Post: Potential D&O Risks Arising from Corporate Social Responsibility
In the course of my various foreign travels, I have had occasion to speak to many underwriters and brokers who place D&O insurance for non-U.S. companies whose American Depository Receipts (ADRs) trade in the U.S. There is a pervasive, inexplicable, and mistaken belief among some underwriters and brokers that companies whose Level I ADRs trade in the U.S cannot be subject to a U.S. securities suit. These individuals persist in this error despite the Toshiba case, in which 
Before the ice age, before the flood, before some of the people reading this were even born, the big D&O insurance coverage issue was allocation – that is, the division of loss between covered and non-covered claims or between covered and non-covered parties. After a flurry of judicial decisions in the mid-‘90s, after the addition of entity coverage to the standard D&O insurance policy (also in the mid-‘90s), and after policy allocation language became more or less standardized, litigated allocation disputes became much less frequent. Indeed, the last time I had occasion to write about an allocation coverage decision on this blog 
As I have been wrapping up my various year-end activities, including publishing a list of 
In my recent year-end summary of corporate and securities liability trends (
Cornerstone Research has released its annual survey of securities class action lawsuit filings for 2019. The year’s version of the report introduces some notable innovations. In prior years, the annual report focused exclusively on federal court securities suit filings. In last year’s report, the survey also incorporated significant state court securities litigation data. This year for the first time the report fully incorporates the state court data in the presentation and analysis. The updated report also includes several new interesting perspectives on the past year’s securities litigation filings, particularly with respect to state court lawsuit filings. As the report details, the state court filings “helped push filing activity to record levels.” 
One of the areas of 
As I noted in