Compliance

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Although this is a little off-brand for the BLPB, I thought readers might appreciate a puppy break.  This is Lucky, the newest addition to the family.

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She’s excellent at giving me so much to worry about that I stop thinking about the pandemic!  But that does not mean that stuff stops happening!

Notably, FINRA has a rule proposal out to alter its exiting suitability standard in light of the SEC’s new Regulation Best Interest. FINRA summarized the proposal as doing two things:

  1. amend the FINRA and CAB suitability rules to state that the rules do not apply to recommendations subject to Regulation Best Interest (“Reg BI”), and to remove the element of control from the quantitative suitability obligation; and
  2. conform the rules governing non-cash compensation to Reg BI’s limitations on sales contests, sales quotas, bonuses and non-cash compensation.

Because Reg BI so closely resembles the FINRA Suitability Rule, firms may not have to do too much to comply with the text of the rule.  This leaves me wondering about guidance.  FINRA has many notices to members and other explanations available to give context to the suitability rule.  With regulation moving from the self-regulator to the regulator, will the guidance move…

Happy holidays! Billions of people around the world are celebrating Christmas or Hanukah right now. Perhaps you’re even reading this post on a brand new Apple Ipad, a Microsoft Surface, or a Dell Computer. Maybe you found this post via a Google search. If you use a product manufactured by any of those companies or drive a Tesla, then this post is for you. Last week, a nonprofit organization filed the first lawsuit against the world’s biggest tech companies alleging that they are complicit in child trafficking and deaths in the cobalt mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Dodd-Frank §1502 and the upcoming EU Conflict Minerals Regulation, which goes into effect in 2021, both require companies to disclose the efforts they have made to track and trace “conflict minerals” — tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold from the DRC and surrounding countries. DRC is one of the poorest nations in the world per capita but has an estimated $25 trillion in mineral reserves (including 65% of the world’s cobalt). Armed militia use rape and violence as a weapon of war in part so that they control the mineral wealth. The EU and US regulators believe that consumers…

Have you ever wanted to learn the basics about blockchain? Do you think it’s all hype and a passing fad? Whatever your view, take a look at my new article, Beyond Bitcoin: Leveraging Blockchain to Benefit Business and Society, co-authored with Rachel Epstein, counsel at Hedera Hashgraph.  I became interested in blockchain a year ago because I immediately saw potential use cases in supply chain, compliance, and corporate governance. I met Rachel at a Humanitarian Blockchain Summit and although I had already started the article, her practical experience in the field added balance, perspective, and nuance. 

The abstract is below:

Although many people equate blockchain with bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and smart contracts, the technology also has the potential to transform the way companies look at governance and enterprise risk management, and to assist governments and businesses in mitigating human rights impacts. This Article will discuss how state and non-state actors use the technology outside of the realm of cryptocurrency. Part I will provide an overview of blockchain technology. Part II will briefly describe how public and private actors use blockchain today to track food, address land grabs, protect refugee identity rights, combat bribery and corruption, eliminate voter fraud…

For last year’s Business Law Prof Blog symposium at UT Law, I spoke on issues relating to the representation of business firms classified or classifiable as social enterprises.  Last September, I wrote a bit about my presentation here.  The resulting essay, Lawyering for Social Enterprise, was recently posted to SSRN.  The SSRN abstract follows.

Social enterprise and the related concepts of social entrepreneurship and impact investing are neither well defined nor well understood. As a result, entrepreneurs, investors, intermediaries, and agents, as well as their respective advisors, may be operating under different impressions or assumptions about what social enterprise is and have different ideas about how to best build and manage a sustainable social enterprise business. Moreover, the law governing social enterprises also is unclear and unpredictable in respects. This essay identifies two principal areas of uncertainty and demonstrates their capacity to generate lawyering challenges and related transaction costs around both entity formation and ongoing internal governance questions in social enterprises. Core to the professionalism issues are the professional responsibilities implicated in an attorney’s representation of social enterprise businesses.

To illuminate legal and professional responsibility issues relevant to representing social enterprises, this essay proceeds in four parts.

I’m at the tail end of teaching my summer transactional lawyering course. Throughout the semester, I’ve focused my students on the importance of representations, warranties, covenants, conditions, materiality, and knowledge qualifiers. Today I came across an article from Practical Law Company that discussed the use of #MeToo representations in mergers and acquisitions agreements, and I plan to use it as a teaching tool next semester. According to the article, which is behind a firewall so I can’t link to it, thirty-nine public merger agreements this year have had such clauses. This doesn’t surprise me. Last year I spoke on a webinar regarding #MeToo and touched on the the corporate governance implications and the rise of these so-called “Harvey Weinstein” clauses. 

Generally, according to Practical Law Company, target companies in these agreements represent that: 1) no allegations of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct have been made against a group or class of employees at certain seniority levels; 2) no allegations have been made against  independent contractors; and 3) the company has not entered into any settlement agreements related to these kinds of allegations. The target would list exceptions on a disclosure schedule, presumably redacting the name of the accuser to preserve…

 

 

 

Join me in Miami, June 26-28.

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Managing Compliance Across Borders

June 26-28, 2019

Managing Compliance Across Borders is a program for world-wide compliance, risk and audit professionals to discuss current developments and hot topics (e.g. cybersecurity, data protection, privacy, data analytics, regulation, FCPA and more) affecting compliance practice in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Latin America. Learn more

See a Snapshot: Who Will Be There?
You will have extensive networking opportunities with high-level compliance professionals and access to panel discussions with major firms, banks, government offices and corporations, including:

  • BRF Brazil
  • Carnival Corporation
  • Central Bank of Brazil
  • Endeavor
  • Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
  • Eversheds Sutherland
  • Fidelity Investments
  • Hilton Grand Vacations
  • Ingram Micro
  • Jones Day
  • Kaufman Rossin
  • LATAM Airlines
  • Laureate Education, Inc.

 
  • MasterCard Worldwide
  • MDO Partners
  • Olin Corporation
  • PwC
  • Royal Caribbean Cruises
  • Tech Data
  • The SEC
  • TracFone Wireless
  • U.S. Department of Justice
  • Univision
  • UPS
  • XO Logistics
  • Zenith Source

 

Location
Donna E. Shalala Student Center
1330 Miller Drive
Miami, FL 33146

 

CLE Credit
Upwards of 10 general CLE credits in ethics and technology applied for with The Florida Bar

 

Program Fee: $2,500 

Last Friday, I had the honor to participate in Rutgers Law School’s Fourth Annual Corporate Compliance Institute, presented by The Center for Corporate Law and Governance.  I teamed up with Todd Cipperman, a lawyer and compliance professional who owns his own firm, in leading a discussion breakout session on current topics in financial services and securities compliance.  Todd is the author of The Compliance Advantage: Ten Must-Know Trends to Protect Your Investment Firm.  Our knowledge bases were complementary, and he was a great partner.

The Institute offered a super program, starting with a welcome lecture from Rutgers Law’s own Hui Chen, former Compliance Counsel Expert for the U.S. Department of Justice Fraud Division.  She outlined four concerns for us to focus on over the course of the program:

  • Variety – including the many taxonomies of compliance
  • Use of Data – including disparities in a firm’s treatment of other peoples’ data and its own
  • Measurements and Outcomes – including the importance of measuring outcomes in addition to processes
  • Ethics and Compliance – including the relationship between the two–whether they are co-extensive and, if not, whether one can exist without the other

Following these threads throughout the day proved…

As a former compliance officer who is now an academic, I’ve been obsessed with the $25 million Varsity Blues college admissions scandal. Compliance officers are always looking for titillating stories for training and illustration purposes, and this one has it all– bribery, Hollywood stars, a BigLaw partner, Instagram influencers, and big name schools. Over fifty people face charges or have already pled guilty, and the fallout will continue for some time. We’ve seen bribery in the university setting before but those cases concerned recruitment of actual athletes. 

Although Operation Varsity Blues concerns elite colleges, it provides a wake up call for all universities and an even better cautionary tale for businesses of all types that think of  bribery as something that happens overseas. As former Justice Department compliance counsel, Hui Chen, wrote, “bribery. . .  is not an act confined by geographies. Like most frauds, it is a product of motive, opportunity, and rationalization. Where there are power and benefits to be traded, there would be bribes.” 

My former colleague and a rising star in the compliance world, AP Capaldo, has some great insights on the scandal in this podcast. I recommend that…

Hundreds of men have resigned or been terminated after allegations of sexual misconduct or assault.  Just last week, celebrity chef/former TV star Mario Batali and the  founder of British retailer Ted Baker were forced to sell their interests or step down from their own companies. Plaintiffs lawyers have now found a new cause of action. Although there a hurdles to success, shareholders file derivative suits when these kinds of allegations become public claiming breach of fiduciary duty, unjust enrichment, or corporate waste among other things. Examples of alleged corporate governance missteps in the filings include: failure to establish and implement appropriate controls to prevent the misconduct; failure to appropriately monitor the business; allowing known or suspected wrongdoing to persist; settling lawsuits but not changing the corporate culture or terminating wrongdoers; and paying large severance packages to the accused. Google, for example, announced earlier this year that it had terminated 48 people with no severance for sexual misconduct, but until it became public, the company did not disclose a $90 million payment to a former executive, who had allegedly coerced sex from an employee. Earlier this week, Google acknowledged another $35 million payment to a search executive who had been accused…

A bunch of us sensed that it was coming.  I raised the question in an October 8, 2018 post here.  Now, it has actually happened.

Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has finally caught the negative attention of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with yet another of his reckless tweets.  The WaPo reported earlier tonight that “[t]he Securities and Exchange Commission . . . asked a federal judge to hold Tesla CEO Elon Musk in contempt for violating the terms of a recent settlement agreement . . . .”  That settlement agreement, as readers will recall, relates to SEC allegations that Musk lied to investors when he posted on Twitter that he had secured the funding needed to take Tesla private.  The settlement agreement provides for the review and pre-approval of Musk’s market-moving public statements.

Ann Lipton and I, as BLPB’s resident fraud mongers, have been following the Musk affaire de Twitter for a number of months now.  (See, e.g., here, here, and here.)  Based on our prior posts, it seems clear the world was destined for this moment–a moment in which the SEC not only catches Musk in a tweeted misstatement but also…