Bruce Carton

Image: Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell has announced that the Justice Department is creating a cyber-security unit within the Criminal Division. Prosecutors will serve as a “central hub for expert advice and legal guidance regarding the criminal electronic surveillance statutes for both U.S. and international law enforcement conducting complex cyber-investigations,” Caldwell said.

Cyber-security firm FireEye released a report this week on a group of hackers that has targeted e-mail accounts of individuals with access to confidential information at more than 100 companies. The hackers are looking for non-public information about merger and acquisition deals and other major market-moving revelations, particularly in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. More inside.

Last year’s SEC Trial Scorecard for FY 2014 is in the books, so it is time to get started on our FY 2015 SEC Trial Scorecard. The SEC Trial Scorecard tracks the SEC’s trials in federal court, along with the outcome.    To date in FY 2014 (which began on October 1, 2014), the SEC has […]

In March 2014, I began tracking the SEC’s federal court trials in FY 2014 (which began on October 1, 2013), and the results in each case. The SEC’s final trial scorecard in FY 2014 included a total of 17 trials. Of those 17 trials, SEC had five outright victories in which it won on all […]

Today on TheRacetotheBottom blog, Prof. J. Robert Brown Jr. of the University of Denver Law School took a playful poke at the Association of American Law Schools for its recent announcement (still on its website here) that SEC Chair Mary Jo White will be the inaugural speaker for its Showcase Speaker series. The AALS touted Chair White […]

As also happened with recent natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, the Ebola outbreak that has captured the attention of the American public has become a possible tool of scam artists. The SEC suspended trading in four companies today — Bravo Enterprises Ltd., Immunotech Laboratories Inc., Myriad Interactive Media Inc., and Wholehealth Products […]

In case there was any ambiguity that companies may not send foreign government officials on a “world tour” in order to secure business, the SEC made that clear yesterday. In an administrative proceeding filed yesterday, the SEC sanctioned two former employees in the Dubai office of U.S.-based FLIR Systems Inc. for violating the FCPA via […]

On September 14, 2014, the SEC filed an insider trading case against Dmitry Braverman, a senior information technology professional at law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The case was the SEC’s second in a six month period alleging insider trading by law firm employees, and the SEC emphasized that trading by law firm employees was an […]

As I discussed here last week, the SEC recently stated its intention to create a Fair Fund to distribute the funds from its $602 million insider trading settlement with SAC Capital to the people who were on the losing side of certain trades with SAC. This week, that decision was met by an unusual “dissent” from […]

On November 10, 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Douglas Whitman’s appeal of his August 2012 conviction on two counts of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and two counts of securities fraud. Prosecutors in the SDNY had charged Whitman, a portfolio manager at Whitman Capital, LLC, with engaging in insider trading schemes that earned his […]