Publications

When the financial news covers in-house counsel lately, the stories are increasingly about government enforcement actions against those lawyers. Following Enron, other corporate scandals, and the enactment of Sarbanes-Oxley earlier this decade, the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) and the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) heightened their scrutiny of lawyers as “gatekeepers” for the public companies they represent. In a speech two years ago, then SEC Enforcement Director Stephen Cutler announced increased enforcement attention on attorneys, whom he referred to as “sentries of the marketplace” whose job it was to “ensur[e] that our markets are clean.”