Regulatory Enforcement

Steven Fagell, most recently the Deputy Chief of Staff and Counselor to the Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice, has rejoined the international law firm of Covington & Burling as a partner. Fagell will practice in the firm’s litigation group, with a particular focus on white collar defense, internal […]

Those involved in any facet of corporate compliance, governance, and/or financial reporting now have a roadmap of sorts for what they can expect to fill up their calendar—and to submit comments on—in the coming months. The Securities and Exchange Commission has laid out a schedule of how it plans to tackle its massive rulemaking undertaking […]

Hewlett-Packard and its former CEO, Mark Hurd, may have finally ended their bitter dispute over Hurd’s move to Oracle, but the case still provides plenty of lessons for board directors and corporate legal departments on the limits of non-compete and confidentiality agreements. On Sept. 20, the ousted CEO agreed to give up about $13 million […]

In a span of just six weeks, the whistleblower provisions in the recently enacted Dodd-Frank Act have gone from a little-known sleeper section of the law to one of its most highly scrutinized provisions. Congress has been vocal that the whistleblower provisions are a smart way to uncover more fraud—at no cost to the taxpayers, […]

Jumping on the bandwagon with other circuit courts, an influential federal appeals court has adopted for the first time a five-part test for determining the nature of the attorney-client relationship between corporate employees and corporate counsel. The California-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case of U.S. v. Graf, adopted the Third Circuit’s widely […]

Corporations worried about compliance with the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—which would be, like, all of them—have a few more glimpses into the costs of investigating and settling FCPA probes that might prove to be useful benchmarks. FCPA headlines tend to be dominated by large corporations settling large corruption problems, with large fines and penalties in […]

More summer reading for those with an interest in anti-corruption enforcement: The latest thinking on how federal prosecutors can encourage cooperation by rewarding companies for self-reporting transgressions of U.S. anti-bribery laws, courtesy of Baker & McKenzie partners Robert Tarun and Peter Tomczak. In their proposal for leniency for self-reporting and cooperation by companies that uncover […]

Regulators and enforcement agencies continue as always to preach the mantra that corporations should voluntarily disclose instances of misconduct, but a new study is fueling the constant debate about what rewards corporations really get in exchange for confessing their sins. The study reviewed financial restatements over the course of eight years, and found that the […]

You may feel like the Dodd-Frank Act has been with us for months already, but President Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law only two weeks ago. Lawyers, bankers, auditors and compliance executives have now had several weeks to digest the final version of the 2,300-page law, and how […]