The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance has released its 2025 U.S. Governance Post-Season Review, a report titled "Evolving Priorities in a Shifting Landscape," examining how the priorities of boards, investors and proxy advisors moved during the most recent U.S. proxy season.

The review is the Forum's annual post-season post-mortem, a fixture of the governance calendar that practitioners, corporate secretaries and institutional investors use to benchmark what happened in shareholder meetings and what it signals for the year ahead.

What is the report about?

The 2025 edition frames this proxy season as a period of shifting priorities. The title itself signals the central argument: the issues that dominated shareholder engagement and voting in prior seasons are evolving, and the environment in which boards operate has changed alongside them.

The Forum publishes the review after the bulk of U.S. annual meetings conclude, when the results of shareholder proposals, director elections and management proposals are known. Its purpose is to consolidate the season's outcomes into a single assessment of where governance pressure is now concentrated.

Who is the audience?

The Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance is a widely read platform for governance commentary, drawing contributions from law firms, institutional investors, proxy advisors and academics. Its post-season review circulates largely among:

• Corporate boards and executive teams preparing for the next engagement cycle;
• Institutional investors and asset managers calibrating voting policies;
• Legal and governance advisers advising clients on disclosure and proxy strategy.

Why does the post-season review matter?

For executives, the review functions as an early indicator of where activist campaigns, shareholder proposals and investor stewardship teams will focus attention next. Priorities identified in a post-season review tend to migrate into proxy advisor policy updates, engagement agendas and, eventually, ballot items at subsequent annual meetings.

The 2025 title places the emphasis on change. "Evolving Priorities" suggests the report documents which governance themes gained traction this season and which receded — the core analytical question every post-season review answers.

What should readers watch next?

The release of the review typically precedes the autumn cycle, when proxy advisors update their benchmark policies for the following year and institutional investors publish updated voting guidelines. Themes flagged in the Forum's post-season analysis frequently reappear in those policy revisions.

Executives and governance teams seeking the full detail — including the specific proposal outcomes and voting data underpinning the report's conclusions — should consult the review directly on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance site.

CEO Frontier will continue to track governance developments through the remainder of the 2025–2026 proxy cycle.