Lawyers
Corporate partner Carmen Lu discussed the current shareholder campaign landscape on the July 22 episode of Bloomberg TV’s “Bloomberg Deals.” The first half of the year saw a record number of shareholder campaigns as activist investors increasingly target companies that meet certain criteria, rather than specific sectors, Carmen says. Generally, targeted companies are fundamentally good businesses, are undervalued and present opportunities for relatively near-term fixes, with shareholder activity concentrated in the tech and industrial sectors because they have a large proportion of companies that fit those criteria, she explains.
While shareholder campaign activity has remained high, the number of proxy fights has dwindled, with just a handful in the first half of 2026. These figures reflect a shift in activist tactics, likely because proxy fights are expensive, both for companies and for the activists, Carmen notes. She added that AI could become a key theme of future campaigns. “[W]ith all this AI spend, I think one of the questions activist investors may be having for companies is, ‘What’s the ROI?’ Because if you’re an activist investor, you’re looking at every single dollar that a company’s investing and saying, ‘Is this dollar better invested in AI? Or is this dollar better returned to the shareholders?’”
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