nvestors and banks are likely to help set any new timeline for public company reporting as regulators press ahead on President Donald Trump’s bid to end quarterly reports, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins told CNBC on Friday.
“For the sake of shareholders and public companies, the market … can decide, you know, what the proper cadence is,” Atkins said in an interview following Trump’s comments earlier this week.
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“Investors … will demand that sort of information at the cadence that’s appropriate to what the company’s doing and what it’s up to,” he said, adding that banks also “will have something to say” for companies with debts, issuances and other similar issues.
Atkins did not lay out any timeline for the change, which would be a major shift for corporate America.
“In principle, I think… to propose change and what our rules are now, I think would be a good way forward, and then we’ll consider that and move forward after that,” he told CNBC.
Trump previously pushed the change to earnings reports in 2018 during his first White House term and renewed his call in a post on his social media platform on Monday.
And most states’ statutes strictly forbid ownership of law firms by nonlawyers. Only Arizona allows direct non-attorney ownership of law firms, although Utah and Washington, DC, have relaxed some restrictions, Bloomberg reported.
Burford Capital believes it may have found a way around states’ prohibitions–through the use of a bifurcated arrangement involving managed service organizations, or MSOs: The lawyers in a law firm would handle the legal work through a lawyer-owned entity. The MSO would control the firm’s assets and sell back-office services to the law firm for a fee, according to Bloomberg and the Financial Times news reports.
It’s uncertain if such an arrangement would be considered legal in most states, or if they would be challenged in courts or state legislatures. A ruling early this year by the Texas Bar’s Professional Ethics Committee appeared to give the nod to MSOs for law firms, under certain conditions: Law firms could not split their fees with the managing organization.