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October 7, 2019

Your Spouse Wants to Help “Design” Your IPO Prospectus? (Discuss)

What a freak show the now-aborted WeWork IPO wound up being. For example, this falls into the “news of the weird” category – check out this excerpt from this article about the role the CEO’s spouse played in preparing the company’s Form S-1:

An S-1 is meant to be a bland financial document, but WeWork’s took a different direction. With Adam’s encouragement, Rebekah became unusually involved in the artistic presentation of the document. “The traditional approach to producing an S-1 is bankers and lawyers hashing this out, but the process was continually usurped by Rebekah’s involvement,” one executive said, echoing a sentiment expressed by multiple people who worked on the project. “She treated it like it was the September issue of Vogue.”

WeWork had hired a former director of photography at Vanity Fair, and Rebekah insisted on selecting the photographers chosen to take photos of WeWork offices and members, and approved every photo that appeared in the S-1, of which WeWork included many more than most companies that go public. (She wasn’t the only picky one: Adam Kimmel, the company’s chief creative officer, became unhappy with how the company’s offices looked in its official pictures, so new photographers were sent around the world to reshoot them.)

As the summer wore on, WeWork employees found themselves making so many trips to meet with Rebekah at the Neumanns’ home in Amagansett that “He’s ‘out east’ tomorrow” became a euphemism for describing a colleague spending their day driving to and from the Hamptons. “The thing that’s so damning about all that is that it’s just not the point of the document,” a person who worked on the project said. “That’s the thing about WeWork: You’re spending all this time working on the surface of it instead of the actual truth of the thing.”

CalPERS Votes Against 53% of Pay Plans!

This blog by Jim McRitchie is mindblowing! Here’s a summary:

CalPERS, the largest U.S. pension fund which manages more than $380 billion in assets, has already started implementing its new compensation framework. In an effort to drive more accountability and improved pay for performance alignment, CalPERS reports voting against 53% of compensation plans at portfolio companies during the 2019 proxy season. That is up from 43% last year.

September-October Issue: Deal Lawyers Print Newsletter

This September-October issue of the Deal Lawyers print newsletter was just posted – & also mailed – and includes articles on:

– Five Observations on Recent Use of Universal Proxies
– Delaware Chancery Upholds Waiver of Appraisal Rights
– Does Your Acquisition Agreement Trigger a Form 8-K?
– Disclosure of Projections: Will Delaware’s Approach Still Rule the Roost?

Right now, you can subscribe to the Deal Lawyers print newsletter with a “Free for Rest of ‘19” no-risk trial. And remember that – as a “thank you” to those that subscribe to both DealLawyers.com & our Deal Lawyers print newsletter – we are making all issues of the Deal Lawyers print newsletter available online. There is a big blue tab called “Back Issues” near the top of DealLawyers.com – 2nd from the end of the row of tabs. This tab leads to all of our issues, including the most recent one.

And a bonus is that even if only one person in your firm is a subscriber to the Deal Lawyers print newsletter, anyone who has access to DealLawyers.com will be able to gain access to the Deal Lawyers print newsletter. For example, if your firm has a firmwide license to DealLawyers.com – and only one person subscribes to the print newsletter – everybody in your firm will be able to access the online issues of the print newsletter. That is real value. Here are FAQs about the Deal Lawyers print newsletter including how to access the issues online.

Broc Romanek