TheCorporateCounsel.net

December 7, 2015

“FAST Act” Enacted: Let’s See Those Law Firm Memos!

On Friday, President Obama signed the FAST Act into law – so rulemaking at the SEC will commence shortly and you’ll need to start drafting those law firm memos (which we’ll be posting in our “FAST Act” Practice Area! This MoFo memo, Gibson Dunn blog & Cooley blog summarize the provisions, as I did in this blog last week…

FCPA: SEC’s New “Self-Reporting” Policy

Here’s news excerpted from this Morgan Lewis memo:

On November 17, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that companies subject to Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) enforcement actions would need to self-report their potential misconduct to be eligible for deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and non-prosecution agreements (NPAs). SEC Enforcement Director Andrew Ceresney revealed the policy change in his remarks at the American Conference Institute’s 32nd Annual FCPA Conference, citing “the importance of self-reporting to our FCPA investigations” and the SEC’s intention to “encourage self-reporting of violations through our cooperation program” and “incentivize firms to promptly report FCPA misconduct to the SEC.”

While the new policy requires companies to self-report in order to be eligible for DPAs and NPAs, Ceresny made it clear that self-reporting will not guarantee such resolutions. According to Ceresney, “[d]eterminations of how much credit to give an entity for cooperation, including whether to take the extraordinary step of entering into a DPA or NPA, are made by evaluating the broad factors set out by the [SEC] in the Seaboard report,” which include factors like self-policing, remediation, and cooperation with law enforcement authorities.

Model Social Media Privacy Legislation Coming in 2016

From this blog by Allen Matkins’ Alexander Nestor:

The Uniform Law Commission (ULC), a non-profit unincorporated association comprised of state commissions on uniform laws from each state, recently announced that it intends to vote on model social media privacy legislation in 2016. The proposed legislation would seek to bring uniformity and consistency to social media privacy legislation across the states, particularly in those states (currently 27) that have yet to pass such legislation. It would apply both to employer access to employees’ social media account information and to university access to students’ social media account information. Here is a preview of the ULC’s draft model act.

Broc Romanek