Is it too late to revisit a prediction we made a year ago January? Back then we forecast that 2015 would feature “an unprecedented assault on proxy advisers.” Former SEC Commissioner Daniel Gallagher had been prodding corporations to hit ISS and Glass Lewis for inaccuracies in their reports and to use new SEC protocols in Staff Legal Bulletin 20 to bring complaints to his personal office. But while bitterness against the two advisers remained high in CEO suites, critics in 2015 never opted for the open warfare we had expected. We later speculated that hostilities failed to materialize because institutional investors undertook time-consuming efforts to meet new SEC rules on monitoring proxy advisers, while the advisers, in turn, beefed up their own internal quality controls and signed up to an industry code of professional behavior. They had made themselves less of a target. So we dutifully conceded a few months ago that we’d called it wrong.
