Ron Geffner On The Legal Aspects Of Activist Shortselling – 2018 Kase Learning Shorting Conference

Full notes of Ron Geffner, Partner, Sadis & Goldberg LLP from the

, from the 2018 Kase Learning Shortselling Conference.

Please note this transcript may contain mistakes – this was done by a human but its impossible to get every word correct and the audio was a bit unclear at times – enjoy

Q3 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc

Ron Geffner:

Thanks to Whitney and to Kase for having me present in front of you today. I know you say in show business never to follow in to older kids. I’m a little confused what to do when you are following a cliff on a hangover.

I was thinking of how to discuss some of the concepts that Whitney had wanted me to present upon. While some of it, we want to focus on insider trading—and that is relevant in the short time frame, I don’t think I can do certain subjects justice. There is wide information and activity that short sellers often sometimes lose sight of.

So I’m going to start off with discovery story, because each of you comes upon the information you want to act on, that’s actual. You might here it through verbal conversation. You may read about it. Someone might send you a document. Or it might be through some form public dissemination of 10-K or 10-Q. The first thing you should be considering doing is assessing whether this information is material, non-public information. I will refer to this as the acronym MNPI. It’s one of those things that when you see it, you know it. But it’s a scale. So while you think like it’s very clear that it’s MNPI, in many cases, it’s not always that clear.

I’ve worked on short activist campaigns with clients and the first line of defense usually is