Legal Resouces: Blogs, Lawgents & Practical Law Company

As mentioned last month, I was proud to have CorpGov.net included in a list of the 25 best business law blogs for 2010 by LexisNexis. The well deserved winner was theCorporateCounsel.net/blog.  However, check out the rest of the blogs. Many are excellent.

Another new site, at least to me, is Lawgents.com, a legal news aggregator (shouldn’t it be Lawagents instead of gents?).  You choose which legal blogs and resources to follow and can see the five most recent updates from each site chronologically in a single place. You can subscribe and unsubscribe at anytime from about 100 feeds. Better yet, you can “Request a Feed” and they are very responsive in adding them… and the service is free. I’ve added them to the Law portion of our Links page.

Last, I reacquainted myself with Practical Law Company, which is primarily aimed at in-house counsel. PLC Cross-border has plenty of multi-jurisdictional guides (Handbooks) outlining the law and practice on various subjects by jurisdiction.  Chapters are organized in an identical question and answer format, and can be searched by question and jurisdiction.

Looking at PLC-US, they do a good job of providing a multitude of overviews. A few picked at random:

  • federal, state, exchange and institutional investor based corporate governance standards,
  • how to deal with a proxy contest
  • preparing for an annual meeting
  • Risk Factors: What Keeps You Up at Night?

They also have an abundance of standard clauses, practice notes and checklists. Need to file an SEC Form 8-K? You can find it here complete with instructions for this and many other filings. The site would also be handy for shareowners. For example,

328 companies were selected from among the list of Fortune 500 companies that filed proxy statements in the 2010 calendar year for an annual stockholders’ meeting to be held during 2010. Of the 328 companies reviewed, 165 included at least one stockholder proposal in their proxy statements and a total of 387 stockholder proposals were included in the proxy materials. Often one stockholder who holds shares in several public companies submits the same proposal to more than one company.

You can easily see what type of proposals were filed, what weren’t included in the proxy (no-action or withdrawal), and whether the proposals passed or failed… and you can pull down the language. If you’re thinking about submitting a proposal, it could be handy to know that “eliminating supermajority passed 82% of the time, while less than 16% approved “say on pay” proposals from shareowners.

I’ve only just scratched the surface. Register here for a free trial. Let me know what you think. Are there better solutions out there?

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