TheCorporateCounsel.net

July 15, 2004

The True Impact of the

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a great article on how last month’s US Supreme Court case has wreaked havoc on the ability to judges to sentence in federal courts. But the article missed one important point – that the Supreme Court case really doesn’t change the fact that the new sentencing guidelines impose vastly different compliance criteria on companies.

In other words, it is still important to learn the lessons to be imparted in next Wednesday’s webcast – “How the New Sentencing Guidelines Impact You.” To get up-to-speed before the program, you can check out an excellent article we just posted by one of the panelists, Jeff Kaplan, in our “Compliance Training” Practice Area (which also contains links to a number of law firm memos on the topic at the bottom of that page).

Sample Procedures for Filtering Third-Party Communications to Directors

If you are working on documenting written processes for collecting, reviewing, sorting, “filtering” and summarizing communications from third parties to independent directors – in their capacity as audit committee members and otherwise – you can check out two new documents that we have posted in our “Sample Document” Library.

Both in Word files, we have posted “Internal Process for Handling Communications to the Audit Committee” and “Internal Process for Handling Communications to Directors (Non- Audit Committee).”

Compensation Surveys Are Biased

The Working Draft of the September-October issue of The Corporate Counsel (which is posted on CompensationStandards.com) includes an excellent piece from veteran consultant Fred Cook on the 12 different types of bias that is present in benchmarking conducted by most compensation consultants. This piece is also posted on CompensationStandards.com as a practice pointer called “Compensation Surveys Are Biased” under “Surveys and Benchmarking—What is Wrong.”