When the Corporation Investigates Itself

By Miriam H. Baer April 11, 2018 by renholding

There may have been a time – say, four or five decades ago – when the internal corporate investigation was viewed with suspicion, if not outright distaste. Today, however, the corporate internal investigation is the norm. Corporations investigate themselves for …

SEC Discusses Online Trading Platforms — With a Word of Caution

By Stephen J. Crimmins March 29, 2018 by renholding

On March 7, 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Enforcement Division and its Trading & Markets Division issued a joint “Statement on Potentially Unlawful Online Platforms for Trading Digital Assets.”[1] The release appeared to be the strongest signal yet …

How Cross-Border Cooperation Improves Securities Enforcement and Financial Reporting

By Roger Silvers March 27, 2018 by renholding

In a recent study, I investigate cross-border coordination among national securities regulators and its impact on enforcement and financial reporting. The paper provides an in-depth look at the cross-border enforcement program at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), …

Skadden Discusses Novel Theories Emerging in Merger Enforcement

By Maria Raptis, Ingrid Vandenborre, Thorsten C. Goetz and Justine M. Haimi March 6, 2018 by renholding

Antitrust merger enforcement historically has focused on horizontal mergers — consolidation of two firms that compete directly in the same space. This is especially true in the U.S., where antitrust authorities have challenged few vertical mergers — those of a …

Wachtell Discusses What to Expect in White Collar and Regulatory Enforcement for 2018

By John F. Savarese, Ralph M. Levene, Wayne M. Carlin, David B. Anders, Jonathan M. Moses and Marshall L. Miller January 31, 2018 by renholding

In our memo last year, we acknowledged that it was close to impossible to predict the likely impact that the newly elected Trump administration would have on white-collar and regulatory enforcement. (White Collar and Regulatory Enforcement: What to Expect …

Smart Contracts and the Cost of Inflexibility

By Jeremy M. Sklaroff January 4, 2018 by renholding

The blockchain revolution is upon us. In a seemingly endless wave of coverage focusing on everything from financial services to healthcare to supply chain management, commenters are predicting fundamental changes to technology and business models.

Smart contracts – electronic …

How Effective Is the SEC in Identifying Financial Reporting Errors?

By Matthew Kubic December 22, 2017 by renholding

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Division of Corporate Finance (DCF) reviews and regulates information in public filings to “deter fraud and facilitate investor access to information necessary to make informed investment decisions.”

Commentators criticize the SEC for …

SEC Enforcement Co-Chief Talks Cybersecurity and Retail Investor Protection

By Stephanie Avakian November 1, 2017 by renholding

Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to speak today. Before I begin, let me give the required disclaimer that the views I express here today are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Commission

…

The Rise of Financial Regulation by Settlement

By Matthew C. Turk September 12, 2017 by renholding

The dramatic escalation in enforcement activity by federal agencies against large financial institutions since the financial crisis is well known. These days the latest multi-billion dollar deal between regulators and Wall Street banks has lost blockbuster status and hardly even …

Harmful, Harmless, and Beneficial Uncertainty in Law

By Scott Baker and Alex Raskolnikov May 30, 2017 by renholding

Law is full of vague standards, legally relevant facts are frequently unclear, sanctions and damages are often uncertain, and the likelihood of detection is rarely known precisely. In our forthcoming paper, we ask how these sources of uncertainty, common in …

How to Improve Corporate Compliance with the Law

By Vincent DiLorenzo May 19, 2017 by renholding

Corporations have been making news recently with repeated violations of the law. In some cases, such as financial services, the violations have occurred across large segments of an industry. Enforcement officials have imposed billions of dollars in sanctions against all …

JPMorgan Case Offers Trifecta of Off-the-Rails FCPA Enforcement

By Mike Koehler April 5, 2017 by renholding

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has specific elements that must be met in order for there to be a violation. However, with increasing frequency it appears that the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission have transformed FCPA …

The Public Interest in Corporate Settlements

By Brandon L. Garrett March 23, 2017 by renholding

Corporate settlements are proliferating in form and function. They include consent decrees, corporate integrity agreements, deferred prosecution agreements, non-prosecution agreements, leniency agreements, and plea bargains. Enforcers at the federal and state level now enter an array of administrative, civil, and …

PwC Explores Whether Trump Will Stay the Course on Sanctions

By Dan Ryan, Sean Joyce, Jeff Lavine, Joseph Nocera, Didier Lavion and Armen Meyer February 17, 2017 by renholding

President Trump made many statements during the campaign regarding actions he plans to take to reverse Obama administration sanctions policies.[1] These included revisiting the agreement to ease sanctions on Iran, rolling back the sanctions program against Russia, and reversing …

Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer Discusses FTC Merger Remedy Study

By Michael Bernstein, Peter Levitas and Matthew Tabas February 16, 2017 by renholding

On February 3, 2017, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC or Commission) released the findings of its “Merger Remedy Study” (the FTC Study) which examined the effectiveness of Commission-required remedies in transactions from 2006 to 2012.[1] The FTC Study—its …

Skadden Discusses a House Bill that May Shake Up CFTC Rulemaking

By Mark D. Young, Maureen A. Donley, Rachel Kaplan Reicher, Prashina J. Gagoomal, Daniel B. O'Connell and Shekida A. Smith February 13, 2017 by Jeff Himelson

Less than two weeks into the new congressional session, the U.S. House of Representatives passed by a vote of 239 to 182 the Commodity End-User Relief Act¹ (the Bill or House Bill), marking the first step by the new …

Cleary Gottlieb Reviews CFTC’s New Cooperation Guidelines for Enforcement Actions

By Breon Peace, Jennifer Kennedy Park, Robin M. Bergen and Nowell D. Bamberger February 9, 2017 by renholding

On January 19, 2017, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (the “CFTC”) Division of Enforcement (the “Division”) issued two Enforcement Advisories setting forth the factors that the Division may consider in assessing cooperation by companies and …

Debevoise Looks at UK’s Initial Move to Expand Corporate Criminal Liability

By Karolos Seeger, Alex Parker and Andrew Lee February 2, 2017 by renholding

On January 13, the UK Government took a step towards significant reform of the business crime landscape by issuing a formal “call for evidence” in relation to corporate liability for economic crimes such as fraud, false accounting and money laundering. …

When Does Corporate Criminal Liability for Insider Trading Make Sense?

By John P. Anderson January 24, 2017 by renholding

Corporations are subject to broad criminal liability for the insider trading of their employees. Critics have noted that this results in a harsh irony. “After all,” as Professor Jonathan Macey notes, “it is generally the employer who is harmed by …

Regulatory Entrepreneurship

By Elizabeth Pollman and Jordan M. Barry January 4, 2017 by renholding

In our new article, available here, we examine what we term “regulatory entrepreneurship”: companies pursuing a line of business in which changing the law is a significant part of the business plan. Regulatory entrepreneurship is not a new phenomenon, …

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The CLS Blue Sky Blog

Columbia Law School's Blog on Corporations and the Capital Markets

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