The more efficient model is preventive rather than reactive.
Instead of assembling expertise transaction by transaction, owners could maintain standing relationships with independent valuation, restructuring, and fiduciary specialists before conflicts emerge.
When sponsors know in advance that a continuation fund or conflicted restructuring will be reviewed by informed counterparties, the most likely consequence is not more litigation but fewer transactions structured in ways likely to invite challenge.
The greatest value of ownership capability may never appear in litigation statistics. It appears in transactions that are never attempted. Governance capability resembles insurance. A premium is not wasted because the house did not burn down; its value lies in protecting against potentially adverse outcomes.
The obvious objection is that no single owner wants to fund capability whose benefits are shared across the rest of the market. That collective-action problem is real—and it points toward the solution: a standing coalition of large, diversified owners with shared access to governance expertise as permanent infrastructure.
The important distinction is that such a coalition is not primarily about cost-sharing. Its purpose is demand concentration.
Scattered, episodic demand cannot create new markets. Standing, recurring demand can.
Cost-sharing splits the bill for capability that already exists. Demand concentration shapes which capabilities come to exist at all
The proxy-advisory industry offers an existing precedent: It emerged because institutional investors generated sufficient recurring demand for independent voting expertise.
The argument, then, is not that asset owners should simply spend more. It is that they should become repeat purchasers of governance capability.
