Briefing – Lessons from the 2025 Proxy Season

In the current critically-acclaimed film One battle after another, circumstances compel the lead character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, to revisit old conflicts and confront former adversaries. A similar narrative could prove to be one of the major themes in the shareholder activism world this year, as old battles flare up again and activists continue to push for improved corporate performance. My view is largely based on the momentum generated by last year’s high volume of activist campaigns, coupled with the fact that a large percentage of those contests were resolved via negotiated settlements between the activists and the target companies’…

With the 2025 North American proxy season now officially closed, emerging trends in executive compensation are offering valuable insights and shaping important considerations for boards going forward. Here, we explore some of these issues and ways boards and management teams can start to incorporate these into planning for next year’s shareholder meeting.

Bowyer Research first came to the attention of IR Impact – and many on the mainstream governance scene – when the firm’s ESG-skeptic voting policies were picked up by ISS. Today, those policies are available through all the major proxy voting advisory firms and Bowyer Research, which is essentially a mom-and-pop (plus kids) shop run out of Pennsylvania, advises many millions of dollars, including the $57 bn Texas Permanent School Fund. Jerry Bowyer, co-founded Bowyer Research with Susan, his wife of 31 years, , feels the right is playing catch up when it comes to equities and proxy voting –…

DE&I, ESG proposals trends and regulatory changes take center stage at Governance Intelligence briefing How is the proxy season evolving? During a recent Governance Intelligence briefing on Lessons from the 2025 Proxy Season – held in partnership with BetaNXT – Amanda Thrash, senior counsel and assistant corporate secretary at The Williams Companies, said that DE&I issues were still of central importance to investors in 2025. ‘You had large institutional investors like State Street and proxy advisors like Glass Lewis both stating that they would vote against or recommend voting against directors on boards in companies that were not 30 percent gender diverse,’ she said.…