Legal Research

Twittering Your Corporate Securities Information

By John Gregory

The desire of publicly-listed corporations to use current communications in fulfilling their duty to disclose material information about their activities can run into the technical limits of (some of) the new media.

There?s an article [PDF] by an American law firm on the topic ? 8 pages in all.

An amusing example from the article: a corporate blogger was tweeting from a corporate phone conference, and was recalled to order about the limits to discussions of corporate earnings etc. So the next time it happened, he sent out FOUR separate tweets with disclaimers applicable to the same message! (One asks a lot of one?s followers in such circumstances.)

The disclaimers were:

Tweet 1: Important information about the nature of this session. Forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. Click here:

Tweet 2: This session will contain non-GAAP financial measures.

Tweet 3: The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for GAAP financial measures.

Tweet 4: A reconciliation of these measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures can be found by clicking on the following link:

And as Simon Fodden points out on Slaw, tweets are seldom deleted from the Twitter site, so it?s all usable later (if it?s admissible!)

What do you tell your corporate clients about official or unofficial uses of such media? Policies for employees? unofficial use are becoming common (if not uniform), but are there now best practices for official uses?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on May 29, 2009 (boomark / email).