Corporate Executive Blogs
The Washington Post has an interesting article today about a relatively new trend--top corporate executives who maintain their own blogs to discuss, well, whatever they want to discuss. One of the blogs profiled is that of General Motors Vice Chairman Robert A. Lutz, whose maiden post on his FastLane blog jumped right in with some "product talk" about Saturn.
The article also highlights the blog of "Randy" from Boeing , a.k.a. Randolph S. Baseler, Boeing Co.'s vice president of marketing. Randy's initial post back in January stated that "Looking back before the dust settles on 2004, it was a great year of building momentum for BCA [Boeing Commercial Airplanes]. Our orders went up, with 272 in '04 compared to 239 in '03. It was a super year for widebodies for us."
Then there's Sun Microsystems President Jonathan Schwartz, who now blogs at Jonathan's Blog. Schwartz tells the Post that "I rarely have a lawyer look over what I'm posting. It's like, am I going to have a lawyer read my e-mail? A blog is no more dangerous than e-mail or a mobile phone."
Well, we'll see about that. Presumably Schwartz's email and mobile phone are not monitored and searchable by plaintiffs' lawyers the way "Jonathan's Blog" will be if things take a turn for the worse at Sun.
So--what is the over/under on the filing date of the first securities class action to include allegations from a corporate executive's blog? For argument's sake, I'm setting it at December 31, 2005.
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Comments
Sun guy's comments notwithstanding, I'm betting the vast majority of blogs will repeat public statements made elsewhere. Which means that allegations about blogs will be interesting not because the blogs themselves are alleged to contain new false statements, but because the fact that a CEO put the info on a blog -- rather than leaving it in a nameless press release -- will enable plaintiffs to argue that the CEO took personal responsibility for the statement and represented that he had knowledge of the facts underlying the statement.
In other words, the blogs might be more used to demonstrate scienter or personal responsibility, rather than as a source of additional false statements forming the basis of a claim.
Posted by: iocaste | March 19, 2005 9:38 AM
Way under.
Posted by: Peter Henning | March 19, 2005 6:31 PM