Proxy Advisory and Governance Editing and Proofreading Services

Proxy advice is an industry whose entire output is written argument, published on a deadline, about companies that will object. A recommendation to vote against a remuneration report or a director's re-election is read by the board it criticises, by the institutional investors who may follow it, and by commentators who question whether advisers should have this influence at all. The only defence available is that the reasoning was transparent, applied consistently, and grounded in a published policy — and all three of those are properties of the writing.

We edit what proxy advisers, governance teams and their counterparties produce — voting policies and annual policy updates, proxy research reports and vote recommendations, remuneration analyses and pay-for-performance assessments, board composition and independence assessments, contested meeting and activist campaign analyses, engagement reports and stewardship disclosures, issuer response and rebuttal documents, corporate governance codes and comply-or-explain guidance, company secretarial material including notices of meeting and explanatory notes, board effectiveness review reports, and institutional investors' own voting guidelines and stewardship reports. Our editors check that a recommendation traces visibly to a published policy provision, and that criticism is stated as analysis rather than as characterisation.

The recommendation rationale is where this work is judged. A report recommending a vote against, on the basis that pay outcomes were "not sufficiently aligned with performance", invites the company to say that the adviser applied an undisclosed standard — and the company is often right. We write these so the applicable policy provision is cited before the analysis, so the specific facts are set out with figures rather than adjectives, so the company's own explanation is summarised fairly before being answered, and so any departure from the policy's default position is flagged with the reason. We also make the reports say what would have changed the recommendation, which is the most useful sentence for the issuer and the strongest evidence that the assessment was principled. Reports written this way are harder to dismiss as ideological, which is the criticism the sector most needs to answer and least often does.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including draft recommendations, engagement records and pre-publication research. We are editors rather than governance or legal advisers, and we offer no view on any recommendation — the analysis remains yours. What we can do is make the reasoning explicit, the tone measured, and the policy application visible.