One of the best things about writing for Compliance Week is reading the fabulous work by my colleagues. For me, CW data and research journalist Aly McDevitt has always stood out as someone whose work in reporting on and writing the Compliance Week case studies is work I have greatly admired.
This week, Aly McDevitt announced on LinkedIn that after six years at Compliance Week, she is stepping away to focus on raising her three young children. In her farewell, she reflected that she arrived as a former middle school English teacher and is leaving as a seasoned journalist. That journey is worth celebrating, because in those six years, she did something rare in compliance industry journalism: She turned compliance case studies into both storytelling and practical education.
Aly was not simply a reporter of events. She was an explainer of systems, cultures, incentives, failures, and remediation. For me, her signature contribution at Compliance Week was long-form case study journalism, the sort of reporting that gave compliance professionals something more useful than headlines. She gave readers context, texture, and most of all, lessons learned.
Her body of work as lead reporter on these case studies speaks for itself: Carnival Cruise Line’s A Tale of Two Storms; Volkswagen’s Coming Clean; the ransomware case study Ransomware Attack; Flex’s Reaching into the Value Chain; Lafarge’s Inside a Dark Pact; and The Banks Behind the Epstein Enterprise. Those six studies covered six very different subjects, yet together they formed a master class in how compliance succeeds, how it fails, and how organizations reveal themselves under pressure.
In the Carnival case study, A Tale of Two Storms, Aly showed how a company already in the middle of a compliance overhaul found that its structural and cultural reforms could shape its response to an entirely different crisis: The pandemic.
In Volkswagen’s Coming Clean, McDevitt helped tell one of the great remediation stories in modern compliance. Her work was not simply reporting. It was a field guide for compliance professionals.
Her ransomware case study, Ransomware Attack, did something equally important. It took a highly technical subject and made it immediate, human, and operational. In Aly’s hands, cyber risk became a governance and decision-making story, not just an IT story.
Her Flex case study showed another side of her reporting range. In Reaching into the Value Chain, she drew out lessons about sustainability, supplier engagement, customer influence, and operational discipline. She highlighted the practical mechanics of the work and the reality that long-term plans must evolve as stakeholder expectations change.
In Inside a Dark Pact, her case study about French cement maker Lafarge, McDevitt traced how “local concessions” in a war zone became terrorist financing and a compliance catastrophe. She made clear a foundational truth: business continuity cannot excuse abandoning core legal and ethical principles.
Then there was The Banks Behind the Epstein Enterprise, one of her most sobering studies. There, the lessons focused on the fault line between compliance and complicity. That is exactly the kind of practical lesson compliance readers need from journalism.
Aly was way ahead of the curve on the implications of the Epstein case. Her case study uncovered how JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank’s compliance programs failed by overlooking Epstein’s crimes because he was a rich client. The mainstream media finally reported the story 18 months later.
What made Aly McDevitt special was that she never treated compliance as abstract. She reported it where it lives: in management choices, broken systems, cultural signals, documentation gaps, crisis response, and the tension between profit and principle. She wrote case studies that respected the intelligence of her readers. She trusted them to sit with complexity. She rewarded that trust with substance. That is a real legacy.
So as Aly McDevitt turns to her next chapter, she should know that her work mattered. She did not merely chronicle compliance. She advanced the profession by showing practitioners how to think more clearly about it. For that, and for the care, rigor, and humanity she brought to her reporting, she deserves our thanks.
Aly, congratulations on a remarkable run at Compliance Week. You leave behind a body of work that educated, challenged, and strengthened us all. As you step into the most important full-time role of all, I wish you every success and every joy on the road of happy destiny ahead.
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