Corporate Governance Practices and Trends in Silicon Valley and at Large Companies Nationwide

Posted by Dave Bell and Ron Llewellyn, Fenwick & West LLP, on Thursday, January 25, 2024

Editor's Note:

David A. Bell is Partner and Co-Chair of Corporate Governance, and Ron C. Llewellyn is Corporate Governance Counsel at Fenwick & West LLP. This post is based on portions of their Fenwick publication.

Corporate governance practices vary significantly among public companies. This reflects many factors, including:

• Differences in their stage of development, including the relative importance placed on various business objectives (for example, focus on growth and scaling operations may be given more importance for technology and life sciences companies);
• Differences in the investor base for different types of companies;
• Differences in expectations of board members and advisors to companies and their boards, which can vary by a company’s size, age, stage of development, geography, industry and other factors; and
• The reality that corporate governance practices that are appropriate for large, established public companies can be meaningfully different from those for newer, smaller companies.

Since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which signaled the initial wave of modern corporate governance reforms among public companies, each year Fenwick has surveyed the corporate governance practices of the companies included in the Standard & Poor’s 100 Index (S&P 100) and the technology and life sciences companies included in the Fenwick – Bloomberg Law Silicon Valley 150 List (SV 150).[1]

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