Corporate Counsel – While it is recognized that corporate counsel can play an integral role in a company’s long term success, the processes through which corporate legal departments provide competitive advantages remain poorly understood. The prevailing wisdom recognizes that companies need to incorporate legal considerations into top-level decision-making, but are most companies doing this?
Business Law
Fall 2015 Research Newsletter
Do Managers Seek Control and Entrenchment?
The CLS Blue Sky Blog – Do managers seek control of the firm, or the level of ownership consistent with entrenchment? Entrenched managers own shares within a range which is high enough to give them control, but sufficiently low to make other shareholders bear the brunt of their non-value maximizing actions. There is a large literature on how entrenched managers can benefit themselves by extracting wealth from other shareholders, but conclusive evidence that managers seek entrenchment is currently lacking.
Preventing the Next Global Debt Crisis
Could Aspects of Corporate Financial Strategies Help Prevent Sovereign Default?
Some key strategies from corporate finance could potentially help prevent governments from spiraling into financial collapse and destabilizing the global economy.
That’s the conclusion of UConn Business Law Professor Stephen Park and co-author Tim Samples, a professor at the University of Georgia, in their research article titled, “Towards Sovereign Equity,” which is pending publication in the Stanford Journal of Law, Business and Finance in 2016.Continue Reading
Karla Fox: UConn is Key to Economic Vibrancy in Connecticut
The late Saturday afternoon teaching time slot was considered by faculty to be the most brutal.
After a full week of work, Executive MBA (EMBA) students had been in class Friday evening and all day Saturday, and by the end of the second day were becoming weary. They needed a dynamic professor to pull them through, and that’s why Business Law & Ethics Professor Karla Fox always taught that final course.Continue Reading
Up Next: Compliance
‘Building a Culture of Compliance’ Continues Executive Education Breakfast Series
The Chief Operating Officer of a nuclear utility in Washington state noticed an employee trip on the stairs after catching her heel on some loose carpeting. The executive, laden with a full schedule of meetings and decisions, “stood guard” in the stairway until a repair person could arrive, ensuring that no one else got hurt.
That is one example of what a ‘culture of compliance’ looks like, where everyone, including key executives, takes individual responsibility for the values of the organization, said Robert Bird, a UConn professor of business law and the keynote speaker at an upcoming UConn School of Business Executive Education breakfast program titled, “Building a Culture of Compliance.”Continue Reading
Ukraine’s Quietly Revolutionary Debt Restructuring
Financial Times – Ukraine’s debt restructuring plan, announced last month, is both revolutionary and evolutionary. The agreement to restructure $18bn of privately held government debt stands in stark contrast to Greece’s nearly apocalyptic showdown with the European Union this year and Argentina’s simmering standoff with holdout creditors.
A Sea-Shanty or Two
Professor DeAngelis Uses Pop Culture, Creativity to Engage Students
When his students were having trouble remembering the details of an important lesson about legal contracts, Business Law Professor Mark DeAngelis wrote a little sea-shanty to help them retain it.
That’s one of the “law-lessongs,” videos, articles, movie clips, TV excerpts and commentary pieces that are the backbone of DeAngelis’ Legal Studies Classroom blog. The site has developed an international following and has had as many as 6,000 views in a single month.Continue Reading
Greece, Argentina Provide Model as Ukraine Considers GDP Linkers
BloombergBusiness – As debt talks intensify between Ukraine and its creditors, securities that pay out if economic growth exceeds expectations will probably be on the agenda, echoing deals done by Argentina and Greece in the past decade.
Time to Flex
Giving Workers More Control of Their Time May Be Good for All
Rep-Am.com – When she first began working there 15 years ago, Beekley Corp. in Bristol was a fairly traditional company. “We were of the mind that everybody needed to be here, 9 to 5,” said Maureen O. Gallo, vice president of human assets and operational excellence at the medical supply company. But when the company began asking its employees what it could do to make them perform at their highest level, one fact was clear: They wanted flexibility.