Laura Thatcher co-authored the recently released
Compensation Committee Handbook (2nd edition, Wiley Publishing, Inc.), an indispensable resource for all corporate compensation committee members in light of SEC regulations and the challenges faced by the corporate governance world following Enron, WorldCom and Sarbanes-Oxley.
Written in a straightforward, practical manner, the updated handbook provides focused guidance to compensation committee members and their advisors on how to maximize the committee’s potential, whether at a large public company or a small private company. The Compensation Committee Handbook will help compensation committee members, as well as CEOs, COOs, CFOs, human resource officers, general counsel and corporate secretaries succeed in melding highly complex technical information and concepts with both corporate governance principles and sound business judgment.
The handbook covers in detail such topics as who should be on the compensation committee, how compensation committees should function, guidelines for responsible performance, and some of the "tools" that compensation committees must use in order to fully and properly perform their jobs.
Laura, a partner and head of the firm’s executive compensation practice, has a background in securities and business law and developed executive compensation as a separate specialty area of the firm’s tax practice in 1995. She now works exclusively in that area and is quoted frequently.
Her practice includes working with public and private companies on the design and implementation of compensation programs, executive employment severance arrangements, change-in-control analysis, securities compliance, insider trading, public disclosure and corporate governance issues.