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I’m a huge football fan. I mean real football– what people in the US call soccer. I went to Brazil for the World Cup in 2014 twice and have watched as many matches on TV as I could during the last tournament and this one. In some countries, over half of the residents watch the matches when their team plays even though most matches happen during work hours or the middle of the night in some countries. NBC estimates that 5 billion people across the world will watch this World Cup with an average of 227 million people a day. For perspective, roughly 208 million people, 2/3 of the population, watched Superbowl LVI in the US, which occurs on a Sunday.

Football is big business for FIFA and for many of its sponsors. Working with companies such as Adidas, Coca-Cola, Hyundai / KIA, Visa, McDonald’s, and Budweiser has earned nonprofit FIFA a record 7.5 billion in revenue for this Cup. Fortunately for Budweiser, which paid 75 million to sponsor the World Cup, Qatar does not ban alcohol. But in a plot twist, the company had to deal with a last-minute stadium ban. FIFA was more effective in Brazil, which has…

As much as I love being a professor, it can be hard. I’m not talking about the grading, keeping the attention of the TikTok generation, or helping students with the rising mental health challenges.

I mean that it’s hard to know what to say in a classroom. On the one hand, you want to make sure that students learn and understand the importance of critical thinking and disagreeing without being disagreeable.

On the other hand, you worry about whether a factual statement taken out of context or your interpretation of an issue could land you in the cross hairs of cancel culture without the benefit of any debate or discussion.

I’m not an obvious person who should be worried about this. Although I learned from some of the original proponents of critical race theory in law school, that’s not my area of expertise. I teach about ESG, corporate law, and compliance issues.

But I think about this dilemma when I talk about corporate responsibility and corporate speech on hot button issues. I especially think about it when I teach business and human rights, where there are topics that may be too controversial to teach because some issues are too close…

Last month, I posted about an experiment I conducted with students and international lawyers. I’ve asked my law student, Kaitlyn Jauregui to draft this post summarizing the groups’ reasoning and provide her insights. Next week, I’ll provide mine in light of what I’m hearing at various conferences, including this week’s International Bar Association meeting. This post is in her words.

After watching The Social Dilemma, participants completed a group exercise by deciding which social issues were a priority in the eyes of different tech industry stakeholders. The Social Dilemma is a 2020 docudrama that exposes how social media controls that influences the behavior, mental health, and political views of users by subjecting them to various algorithms. Director Jeff Orlowski interviewed founding and past tech employees of some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley to bring awareness to viewers.  

Groups of primarily American college students, primarily American law students, one group of Latin American lawyers, and one group of international lawyers completed the exercise. Each of the groups deliberated from the perspective of a CEO, investor, consumer, or NGO.  Acting as that stakeholder, the team then ranked the following issues in order of importance: Incitements to…

You can’t read the business press without seeing some handwringing about ESG. It’s probably why I’ve been teaching, advising, and sitting on a lot more panels about the topic lately. Like it or not, it’s here to stay (at least for now) so I decided to do a completely unscientific experiment on lawyer and law student perceptions of ESG using a class simulation. Over the past three months, I’ve used the topic of tech companies and human rights obligations to demonstrate how the “S” factor plays out in real life. I used the same simulation for foreign lawyers in UM’s US Law in Action program, college students who participated in UM’s Summer Legal Academy, Latin American lawyers studying US Business Entities, and my own law students in my Regulatory Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability class at the University of Miami.

Prior to the simulation, I required the students to watch The Social Dilemma,  the Netflix documentary about the potentially dangerous effects of social media on individuals and society at large. I also lectured on the shareholder v. stakeholder debate; the role of investors, consumers, NGOs, and governments in shaping the debate about ESG; and the basics…

Millions of law school graduates around the US just took the bar exam. Others are preparing to enter colleges and graduates schools in a few weeks. How will these respective groups do? While a lot depends on how much and how well they study, a large part of their success or failure may depend on how they’ve been taught. I recently posted about how adults learn and what the research says we should do differently. In this post, I’ll show how I used some of the best practices in the last ten days when I taught forty foreign lawyers from around the world  and thirty college students in separate summer courses offered by the University of Miami as well as nine Latin American lawyers who were taking courses in business law from a Panamanian school. I taught these disparate groups about ESG, disclosures, and human rights. With each of the cohorts, I conducted a simulation where I divided them into groups to prioritize issues based on whether they were a CEO, an investor, a consumer, the head of an NGO, and for the US college students, I added the roles of a member of Congress or influencer. In a…

Prior to joining academia, I served as a compliance officer for a Fortune 500 company and I continue to consult on compliance matters today. It’s an ever changing field, which is why I’m glad so many students take my Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability course in the Fall. I tell them that if they do transactional or commercial litigation work, compliance issues will inevitably arise. Here are some examples: 

  • In M&A deals, someone must look at the target’s  bribery, money laundering, privacy, employment law, environmental, and other risks
  • Companies have to complete several disclosures. How do you navigate the rules that conflict or overlap?
  • What do institutional investors really care about? What’s material when it relates to ESG issues?
  • What training does the board need to ensure that they meet their fiduciary duties?
  • How do you deal with cyberattacks and what are the legal and ethical issues related to paying ransomware?
  • How do geopolitical factors affect the compliance program?
  • Who can be liable for a compliance failure?
  • What happens when people cut corners in a supply chain and how can that affect the company’s legal risk?
  • What does a Biden DOJ/SEC mean compared to the same offices under Trump?
  • Who

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It’s a lovely Friday night for grading papers for my Business and Human Rights course where we focused on ESG, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. My students met with in-house counsel, academics, and a consultant to institutional investors; held mock board meetings; heard directly from people who influenced the official drafts of EU’s mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence directive  and the ABA’s Model Contract Clauses for Human Rights; and conducted simulations (including acting as former Congolese rebels and staffers for Mitch McConnell during a conflict minerals exercise). Although I don’t expect them all to specialize in this area of the law, I’m thrilled that they took the course so seriously, especially now with the Biden Administration rewriting its National Action Plan on Responsible Business Conduct with public comments due at the end of this month.

The papers at the top of my stack right now:

  1. Apple: The Latest Iphone’s Camera Fails to Zoom Into the Company’s Labor Exploitation
  2. TikTok Knows More About Your Child Than You Do: TikTok’s Violations of Children’s Human Right to Privacy in their Data and Personal Information
  3. Redraft of the Nestle

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Join me in sunny Miami on April 26 for this in-person conference featuring outside counsel, inhouse practitioners, and academics. 

Panel topics include:

Change Management: The Legal Department of the Future –  More and more, in-house legal departments are employing new hybrid and remote work models, incorporating artificial intelligence and technology in their workflows, and restructuring and absorbing new teams after mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. This panel discussion will focus on how the in-house legal department can be a champion in leading successful developmental and transformational change by implementing change management best practices to be effective and efficient, remaining client-focused, and being a trusted business advisor.

Remote Work:  Accelerated Adoption and Related Challenges – Which option would you choose: on-site, hybrid, or virtual? We will discuss the pros and cons of remote work arrangements, including the challenges of implementing a remote work policy in Latin America where the legal framework is a complex patchwork of requirements, as well as the strategies for creating culture and building a team in a remote work environment.

Counseling the Board of Directors (the panel I’m on)-  This panel will focus on issues that arise when counseling the board of directors and address important…

2022 Online Symposium – Mainstreet vs. Wallstreet: The Democratization of Investing

I’m thrilled to moderate two panels this Friday and one features our rock star BLPB editor, Ben Edwards. 

                                                                     REGISTER HERE

The University of Miami Business Law Review is hosting its 2022 online symposium on Friday, March 4, 2022. The symposium will run from 12:30 PM to 3:30 PM. The symposium will be conducted via Zoom. Attendees can apply to receive CLE credits for attending this event—3.5 CLE credits have been approved by the Florida Bar. 

The symposium will host two sessions with expert panelists discussing the gamification of trading platforms and the growing popularity of aligning investments with personal values.

The panels will be moderated by Professor Marcia Narine Weldon, who is the director of the Transactional Skills Program, Faculty Coordinator of the Business Compliance & Sustainability Concentration, and a Lecturer in Law at the University of Miami School of Law.

Panel 1: Gamification of Trading 

This panel will focus on the role of

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Between the Winter Olympics and the Superbowl, this weekend is a sports-lover’s dream. But it can also be a nightmare for others. Next week in my Business and Human Rights class, we’ll discuss the business of sports and the role of business in sports. For some very brief background, under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the state has a duty to protect human rights but businesses have a responsibility (not a duty) to “respect” human rights, which means they can’t make things worse. Businesses should also mitigate negative human rights impacts. I say “should” because the UNGPs aren’t binding on businesses and there’s a hodgepodge of due diligence and disclosure regimes that often conflict and overlap. But things are changing and with ESG discussions being all the rage and human rights and labor falling under the “S” factor, businesses need to do more. The EU is also finalizing mandatory human rights due diligence rules and interestingly, some powerful investors and companies are on board, likely so there’s some level of certainty and harmonization of standards. 

I’ve blogged in the past about human rights issues in sports, particularly the Olympics and World Cup in Brazil…