The Advisors' Blog

– Broc Romanek, CompensationStandards.com

Here’s this blog by Steve Quinlivan:

In Calma v. Templeton et al, the Delaware Court of Chancery held that grants of restricted stock units, or RSUs, to directors of Citrix Systems, Inc. were subject to an entire fairness standard of review. The court found that the grants were a conflicted decision because all three members of the compensation committee that approved the grants also received the RSU awards. Citing Delaware Supreme Court precedent, the court noted director self-compensation decisions are conflicted transactions that “lie outside the business judgment rule’s presumptive protection, so that, where properly challenged, the receipt of self-determined benefits is subject to an affirmative showing that the compensation arrangements are fair to the corporation.”

The court rejected the defendants position that prior stockholder approval of the plan ratified the grants at issue. The court found that Citrix did not seek or obtain stockholder approval of any action bearing specifically on the magnitude of compensation paid to non-employee directors.

The case was before the court on a motion to dismiss. Accordingly, the court found the defendants’ motion must be denied unless, accepting as true all well-pled allegations of the complaint and drawing all reasonable inferences from those allegations in plaintiff’s favor, there is no “reasonably conceivable set of circumstances susceptible of proof” in which plaintiff could establish that defendants breached their fiduciary duties.

The defendants contended the grants were entirely fair because the grants were in line with 14 companies identified in Citrix’ proxy as its peer group. The plaintiff claimed that the appropriate peer group should be limited to only five of those companies based on comparable market capitalization, revenue and net income metrics.

In the court’s view the plaintiff raised meaningful questions as to whether certain companies with considerably higher capitalization, such as Amazon.com, Google and Microsoft, should be included in the peer group used to determine fair value of compensation for Citrix’s non-employee directors. The court therefore refused to grant the motion to dismiss.

As a result of this decision, many advisors will now likely recommend that concrete, realistic limitations on grants to directors be built into a plan so that directors can rely on a stockholder approval defense. If the decision becomes a prelude to the next wave of compensation litigation, many companies may submit their grant practice for stockholder approval even if they do not need a new plan approved.

If you’re a member of TheCorporateCounsel.net, tune in tomorrow for the webcast – “Form S-8: Share Counting, Fee Calculations & Other Tricks of the Trade” – to hear Gibson Dunn’s Krista Hanvey, Davis Polk’s Kyoko Takahashi Lin, Kaye Scholer’s Jeff London and Goodwin Procter’s John Newell discuss a topic rife with uncertainty and traps for the unwary…

Taped an interview with NPR a few weeks ago on virtual shareholder meetings and thought they scraped it. But a ton of folks reached out on Friday night and said they heard it on the radio. Luckily, NPR trimmed my 4-minute interview down to 7 seconds because I wasn’t fab…