General counsel can now sigh with relief—the 2019 proxy season has closed, and their companies can examine what the votes really meant.

Both shareholder activists and corporate management claimed victories, suffered losses, and see a cloudy future with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission considering proxy changes.

James Copland, senior fellow and legal policy director at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, noted that only 6% of shareholder proposals received majority votes—down considerably from 11% in 2017 and 10% in 2018. That’s a positive trend to Copland, whose organization is a pro-business, free market think tank that produces the ProxyMonitor.org database.