Corporate Responsibility

The Compliance Monthly: A CONVERSATION WITH JESSICA WINCHELL, VICE PRESIDENT FOR COMPLIANCE AT BROWN BROTHERS HARRIMAN TRUSTEE SERVICES IN IRELAND

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Jessica Winchell, Vice President of Compliance with Brown Brothers Harriman, describes her path to a career in compliance, skills necessary to succeed in the field, and how her time at Temple Law helped to shape her professional life.

SEC and DOJ Target Insider Trading on the Dark Web

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A high profile action brought recently by the SEC and DOJ against a SpaceX engineer exemplifies the federal government’s ability to monitor the dark web, despite its anonymity. Regardless of the difficulties in monitoring for sensitive information disseminated on the dark web, companies need to take proactive, prophylactic steps to help minimize the danger that company insiders will misuse access to material nonpublic information.

Corporate Transparency Act and Implications for Entity Formation and Transaction Structures

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The 116th United States Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, which includes the Corporate Transparency Act (the CTA). The CTA seeks to provide appropriate safeguards to identify bad actors engaged in terrorism, money laundering, sex trafficking and other heinous acts through “shell companies” that are not actually engaged in a bona fide business venture but instead are created for the principal purpose of shielding the owners from liability for engaging in illicit behavior and, in many cases, their identities.

Executive Private Misconduct

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A file folder with the word "Private" on the front

In recent years, private misbehavior of corporate executives like Harvey Weinstein, Steve Wynn, Leslie Moonves, and Elon Musk has outraged many people around the world. Such misconduct – when made public – has frequently damaged the executives’ public reputations, diminished the value of their companies’ stock, and raised some serious legal and policy issues. Part of the challenge in dealing with misbehaving business executives is that the two bodies of law and regulation that govern much of American business – state corporate law and federal securities law – were largely designed to address the professional duties of executives and not their personal lives. Temple Law Professor Tom Lin proposes an original and workable roadmap for conceptualizing, navigating, and addressing executive private misconduct.

Professor Jonathan Lipson: 2020 Friel-Scanlan Lecture

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On November 10, 2020, Temple Law Professor and 10-Q Faculty Editor Jonathan Lipson delivered the 2020 Friel-Scanlan lecture titled “Sex, Drugs, and Bankruptcy: Due Process and Social Debt.” The lecture was delivered against the backdrop of the American opioid crisis and recent events surrounding the well-publicized bankruptcies of Purdue Pharma, Boy Scouts of America, and other debtors with liability for egregious misconduct. Professor Lipson argued that a bankruptcy system which offers sweeping releases from civil and criminal liability for those involved in this wrongdoing upsets the basic tenets of Due Process.

DOJ Updates Guidance on the Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs

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The Department of Justice-Criminal Division recently updated its internal guidance to federal prosecutors for evaluating corporate compliance programs. Despite the lack of major substantive changes, the updated guidance encourages prosecutors to take the risk profile of corporations into account when evaluating its compliance programs.