Talk:Dov Seidman

New Request Edits January 2023

I have a personal relationship with Dov Seidman, and therefore have a conflict of interest. I am submitting the following proposed changes for independent editors to evaluate, in accordance with the directions at Wikipedia's Contact Us [1] page for the subjects of articles.

1. In the Infobox, in the Children section, PLEASE DELETE

| children = 2. Lev Seidman and Lana Seidman.

and INSTEAD, PLEASE ADD

| children = 2

Note: This is no source for the names of the children. Even if there were one, for privacy reasons I would request Seidman’s children’s names be removed.

 Done Spencer^T•C 21:26, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

AND

for personal website, please delete: | website = www.howistheanswer.com

and change it to:

| website = thehowinstitute.org

Note: This is a more recent website.

 Done Spencer^T•C 21:26, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

2. In the first paragraph, as the last sentence of the paragraph: PLEASE ADD

He is also the founder and chairman of The HOW Institute for Society.

Note: These sources support that his work at the HOW Institute is now a major part of his career, so should be included.

 Done Moved the information about his book into this sentence. Spencer^T•C 21:42, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

3. In Section “Career”, in the first paragraph, please add two sentences to paragraph one.

Borrowing money from friends and using credit cards, he launched the Legal Research Network in 1994, to offer outsourced legal research and analysis to corporate law departments and law firms. He raised $2 million from 42 investors.

Reason: accurately sources the beginning of the company. Sources to major newspaper (Wall Street Journal)

Relevant Excerpt Behind ProQuestPaywall:

“He left his job, canceled a clerkship for the Supreme Court of Israel, borrowed money from friends and went into debt on his credit cards. He wrote Zoe Baird, the Aetna general counsel, and outlined his ideas after reading that she was studying ways to cut the company's legal costs. He did the same with a lawyer at MCI, who introduced him to other corporate executives.
As the business plan developed, Mr. Seidman lured a well-connected board of directors and advisers, some of whom became investors. They include the dean of University of Southern California law school and former Rep. Mel Levine, now a partner at the Los Angeles law firm Gibson, Dunn &Crutcher. Through a private stock offering completed in April, LRN raised just over $2 million from 42 individual investors.”

 Done Spencer^T•C 21:37, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

4. In Section “Career”, in the first paragraph, please add a third sentence to paragraph one.

By the end of 1999, he transitioned LRN into offering a SaaS-based ethics and compliance education platform becoming one of the first companies in compliance training.. Seidman also had LRN analyze corporate cultures and write codes of conduct.

Reason: Describes the transition the company went under in late 1990s. Sourced to Fortune Magazine and Salt Lake Tribune.

 Done I tweaked the wording of this to make it sound a shade less promotional. Spencer^T•C 21:37, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

5. In Section “Career”, in the first paragraph, please add a fourth sentence to paragraph one:

In addition to helping companies meet their compliance requirements, Seidman’s work at LRN was focused on advising companies on how to build ethical cultures that operate successfully.

Reason: more accurately describes the transition that LRN underwent from providing research to training on compliance and ethics. Sources to major magazines and newspapers.

 Not done In my opinion, this type of information would be better suited for the LRN article, unless we can outline specifically what Seidman did to accomplish this. The proposed edit is vague and leans toward a promotional tone. Additionally, I tried looking at the link to see if there were specifics mentioned that I could add, but the link was a dead link. Spencer^T•C 21:39, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

6. After the first paragraph, add a second paragraph

Seidman founded The HOW Institute for Society, a non-profit focused on moral leadership, and served as its chairman.. In the How Institute's 2020 the State of Moral Leadership in Business report, Seidman said the global pandemic and political environment had intensified the need for moral leadership.

Reason: Seidman has taken on a new role as chairman of the HOW Institute. The institute is publishing research on moral entrepreneurship.

 Partly done Added the first sentence; the second sentence seems less directly relevant to Seidman himself and was not added. Spencer^T•C 21:42, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

7. In the Early Life section after the last sentence, which begins “He returned to the United States...”, PLEASE ADD

Seidman’s first business was as a teenager detailing automobiles, including R&B singer Lionel Richie’s cars every Saturday.

Reason: an interesting fact which is part of Seidman’s early life. Not critical but colorful and demonstrative of being an early entrepreneur.

 Done Made a slight modification but implemented. Spencer^T•C 21:32, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

8. As the new last paragraph of “Career”, please add:

In 2022, Seidman became a Hauser Leader at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Reason: Teaching position at Harvard has a Wikipedia page; used a leading foreign publication as source. It covered VP of Phillipines getting same position in same year as Seidman.

 Done Spencer^T•C 21:32, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. Wikiqueen32 (talk) 23:00, 24 January 2023 (UTC) Wikiqueen32 (talk) 23:00, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

I will attempt to review some of these and reply inline above. Best, Spencer^T•C 21:26, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

@Spencer: Thank you very much for the review. I think you may have unintentionally misread the National Journal headnote about the lawsuit. And you also may not have noticed that it was written by two practicing attorneys at a law firm, not by independent journalists.

The mistake - reading the plaintiff’s allegations as if they are findings of fact by the court - makes all the difference as to whether or not the statements should be on the page at all and if so, how much prominence they should be given. This question was discussed once before at [2] and a decision was made by User:Zaereth to remove almost all of the serious accusations against Seidman, which are tantamount to allegations of fraud.

Specifically, one statement you added to the page states that the court said that the investor sale process was "the product of unfair process and resulted in an unfair price." But the court did not say this. Nor does the National Law Journal say the court had ruled on the facts or the merits of the case.[3]

Instead, the National Law Journal says the court found that the plaintiffs "adequately pled facts" to allow a lawsuit to continue. “Pled facts” means making allegations without yet submitting proof. At the time this motion to dismiss was declined, discovery in the lawsuit had not even begun. The plaintiffs were just speculating about what they hoped to eventually prove if the lawsuit were allowed to proceed. For example, there was no factual finding by the court as to the share price at the time of sale or Seidman's proceeds. Nor was this reported as being true by an independent journalist. The Law Journal starts off by referencing the lawsuit consists of plaintiff “claims”, which lawyers, the intended audience here, understand to mean allegations. The FT clearly states the plaintiff is merely making allegations in language intended for a more general audience.

Attorneys reading the Law Journal know that to decide a motion to dismiss, a court must presume for the sake of argument that every allegation in the plaintiff’s complaint is true - and then ask whether there is legal (not factual) basis for a lawsuit if the plaintiff is able to eventually prove these allegations with discovery. The judge here allowed the lawsuit to proceed based on this criteria, rather than making any determination as to the truth of the allegations. The technical headnote by the Law Journal isjwritten by lawyers for lawyers, who understand without continuous reminders that claims in the dismissal stage are mere allegations.

As the Financial Times story from October 2020 states:

The allegations have yet to be tested in court, including the plaintiffs’ assertion that Mr Seidman was discussing a potential sale at the time of the 2017 tender offer.

Please note that the March 2020 piece in the National Law Journal is a headnote written by private lawyers only to summarize the judge's ruling. That's it. There is not any reporting or fact checking. The authors write headnotes in exchange for promotion of their legal practice. If you click on their bylines, you will see it leads to promos about their private practice. [4]

Since there's no independent reporting or analysis involved, I think the headnote does not meet the criteria of a reliable source. It’s much closer to WP: Primary.

Once one understands that everything in the headnote is just unproven accusations - and very serious ones, akin to fraud - then I believe the justification for including it as a 1/3 the Career section goes away. The heightened standard of WP:BLP should apply when there is an unproven accusations of serious wrongdoing by a living person.

The Financial Times article is very careful to describe these accusations as mere allegations. The article also includes a denial by Seidman’s lawyers.

Mr Seidman’s lawyers have dismissed the lawsuit as “seller’s remorse”, stating that no one was forced to sell their shares and that “the [LRN] board never claimed that the tender offer price was fair”.

Some of the allegations have already been publicly disproved. The lawsuit says LRN sold itself to Leeds (and that Seidman approved the deal, not that he personally sold it.) But the New York Times [5] reported it was actually an investment:

The deal’s roots lie in a 2018 investment by Leeds Equity Partners, a capital infusion intended to help LRN increase its share in an estimated $3 billion market for ethics and compliance training.

I’d respectfully ask you to delete the unproven allegations of wrongdoing and the speculation as to the truth. Instead, I suggest restoring something like the sentence describing the lawsuit previously in the “Legal disputes” section.

If there is ever a reliable source that reports these allegations as actually being true, then that should be added to the page. But as of now, there is no such reporting. Wikiqueen32 (talk) 02:56, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the clarification. I have considerably revised the section, and the allegations now represent 1 sentence in the paragraph (not "half") - similar as the article in its prior state - and I feel are now balanced by additional context. It sounds like based on the FT and NYT articles that Seidman has played a large role in these investment deals in the company, so I better clarified in the article. Let me know what you think. If you have specific suggestions for wording, please suggest so. Best, Spencer^T•C 22:20, 9 March 2023 (UTC)

@Spencer:Thank you for your consideration and thoughtful revisions. As you were kind enough to encourage me to make further suggestions, I went through the updates and have a few additional proposed edits that I hope you will consider meritorious:

• The sentence about the lawsuit has a redundancy which is hard to spot without a legal background. The alleged breached fiduciary duty is the same as the alleged encouragement at a low price. This is consistent with the FT but a subtle point. These thoughts can easily be combined. To further condense, since you’ve constructed a tight chronology, I didn’t include the second mention of the Leeds investment.

The following year, in 2019, Seidman, LRN, and two other board members were sued by a former shareholder for breach of their fiduciary duties alleging that shareholders were encouraged to sell their shares at an unfairly low price in 2017 and for not disclosing information regarding a potential transaction to them.

 Done Spencer^T•C 05:09, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

• A passage could be added to create more balance between the opposing sides. According to the FT:

To Mr Seidman’s supporters, the increase in LRN’s value is not a sign of wrongdoing, but a consequence of the growing clamour for corporate ethics initiatives.

The context here is that there was a big uptick that year in business for LRN due to increased awareness of harassment in the workplace in light of the “Me Too” movement.[6] A revised statement might say something like:

Lawyers for Seidman called the lawsuit "seller’s remorse” and others said the growth in LRN’s value was due to greater demand for corporate ethics services. As of October 2020, there had not been a court ruling regarding the allegations.

 Not done Per Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch#Unsupported_attributions, the proposed change is vague with borderline weasel words-- who are these "others"? The FT article does not clearly specify who these people are, and doesn't really cite statements that they made (hence "said" in the proposed change seems a little misleading). That said, I think that this information would be reasonable to add to the article, but done in away that clearly attributes who is making those arguments and is supported by a reliable source. Spencer^T•C

• In the first sentence, can you say that Seidman “negotiated” the deal rather than “brokered” it. Brokers are usually external parties to a deal who bring the main parties together.

 Done Spencer^T•C 05:09, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

• ”to offer to purchase back shares from its shareholders” is incomplete in a subtle but important way. It should be something like “…LRN offered to purchase shares as an accommodation to some shareholders who had asked to liquidate their holdings.” As the FT says:

“At the time, a number of LRN shareholders were looking for a way to liquidate their holdings… LRN used the surplus cash to grant the shareholders their wish, offering to buy them out….”

 Done Spencer^T•C 05:09, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

• In the first sentence the word “which” is missing before the word “allowed”. Just a typo, I think.

 Done Good catch, thanks. Spencer^T•C 05:09, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

I appreciate all your conscientious work and openness to engage in a conversation. Wikiqueen32 (talk) 02:51, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

See my responses inline above. Spencer^T•C 05:09, 18 March 2023 (UTC)

References