“Reverse Conflicts of Interest”

Consider the following (disguised) case, from some years ago….

A company enters into a complex business arrangement where one of its managers has a relationship with the other entity.  The relationship is fully disclosed and approved pursuant to company policy on COI waivers.  After time, the arrangement runs into business difficulties.  Although the company has lived up to its contractual obligations, the other entity seems to feel that the company should have done more to make the arrangement work.  Based partly on that, some employees of the company question whether that entity had been promised more than was disclosed by the manager, causing the employees to take various defensive measures which put further strain on the arrangement. Ultimately, the arrangement collapses.

As a general matter, if properly disclosed and approved, some COIs can be waived (although some should not be permitted under any circumstances).  Such approvals can be either a true “green light” or subject to being managed on an ongoing basis, i.e., a “yellow light.”

Like many C&E-related determinations, this type of decision tends to be made based on a balancing of costs versus benefits (hopefully, with a reasonably high burden of showing that the latter outweigh the former).

The case above illustrates what I believe is a factor that should generally be considered by companies deciding whether to grant a COI waiver: whether there will be reasonable possibility of overcompensating for the COI in ways that are harmful to the company.  The potential for such “reverse COIs” could turn on many factors – perhaps most significantly, on the extent to which the contemplated relationship must rely on trust.  (That is, the greater the need for trust, the greater the possibility of suspicion – at least as a general matter.)

Historically, reverse COIs may not have been common.  But as sensitivity to COIs has grown dramatically over the past few years (the subject of a coming post), they seem more likely to occur than ever before, and should be on a company’s radar in making COI waiver determinations.