TheCorporateCounsel.net

January 8, 2013

SEC’s New GC Hails from the CFTC: Something New

Sock it to me baby! That’s something old. Something new is the SEC hiring a former CFTC Staffer for its own senior staff. That happened yesterday as Geoffrey Aronow was tapped to become the SEC’s new General Counsel. Geoffrey comes from Bingham McCutchen but he had served as the CFTC’s head of Enforcement in the late ’90s. As far as I can remember, Geoffrey is the first senior SEC Staffer with a CFTC background. Maybe a merger of the SEC and CFTC is not far behind…

John Polise used to work at the CFTC and is now an Associate Director in OCIE. But he wasn’t originally hired at the SEC as senior staff.

Will the SEC’s New GC Earn More Than the SEC Chair? Not Likely But Other Staffers Do!

For 2013 – beginning the first applicable pay period beginning after March 27th – the SEC Chair, an Executive Schedule Level III position, will be paid $166,100, and the other Commissioners (an Executive Schedule Level IV position) will be paid $156,300 – and the GC job is an Executive Schedule position that makes less than the Chair. But some mid-level Staffers who have been around a long time make more than $200k (eg. long-tenured SK-17 Staffers) …

The SEC has a special pay schedule comparable to the Federal banking regulators – the S-K pay scale; not the GS scale that most federal employees get paid under. Plus Staffers receive pay plus a locality percentage based on their office location.

Webcast: “The Litigation Explosion in Executive Compensation”

There has been so much going on with the wave of “Say-on-Pay Litigation 2.0” (although the lawsuits are more than just say-on-pay related) that I have been tempted to blog about it daily (see this Mark Borges’ blog and this D&O Diary Blog – as well as this list of cases posted by Faruqi & Faruqi and our own list & memos in CompensationStandards.com’s “Executive Compensation Litigation Portal“).

But I have held off blogging because I knew you could tune in tomorrow for the CompensationStandards.com webcast – “The Litigation Explosion in Executive Compensation” – to hear Orrick Herrington’s Rick Gallagher, Simpson Thacher’s Joe McLaughlin and Paul Hastings’ Mark Poerio discuss what is involved in the rash of new executive compensation-related lawsuits, as well as how to handle them. Please print off these “Course Materials” in advance.

– Broc Romanek