DealLawyers.com Blog

Marty Lipton’s latest post on the HLS blog is an updated version of the firm’s alert ” Dealing with Activist Hedge Funds and Other Activist Investors.” The blog includes detailed discussions of tactics and themes deployed by activists, advance preparation, and responding to an activist approach.

One of the things that stood out to me was this fulsome list of what companies should be doing to monitor for activist activity.

– Employ a sophisticated stock watch service and monitor Schedule 13F filings.
– Monitor Schedule 13D and Schedule 13G and Hart-Scott-Rodino Act filings.
– Monitor parallel trading and group activity (the activist “wolf pack”).
– Monitor activity in options, derivatives, corporate debt and other non-equity securities.
– Monitor attendance at analyst conferences, requests for one-on-one sessions and other contacts from known activists.
– Monitor investor conference call participants, one-on-one requests and transcript downloads.
– Monitor company website traffic for unusual activity, including visits by known activists or their advisors or media outlets.

While I think most companies are monitoring most, if not all, of these things, I suspect there are a number of small- and mid-cap companies that may not have someone “putting it all together.” I could particularly see website traffic (and, I’d add, social media traffic) not being reported to the folks who own the “monitoring activists” task.

– Meredith Ervine