LJN Newsletters

From highly complex e-commerce sites to small "mom and pop" companies, nearly everyone is using the Web to do business. But all of this technology can produce problems ranging from inaccessible and slow-loading Web sites to critical Web applications not functioning when they're needed most.

A confluence of various regulations and court decisions, beyond Sarbanes-Oxley, has made it de rigueur to adopt corporate codes of conduct or corporate compliance and ethic programs. But arguably, and not fully appreciated, the only thing that could be worse for directors and officers these days than not having adopted a corporate compliance program, is having adopted one and not effectively implementing it. Boards of directors and their advisors must now focus on not merely adopting programs, but on establishing procedures and processes that provide active oversight of directors of compliance programs.

In its assault on corporate tax shelters, the IRS ' with considerable help from Treasury and Congress ' has added new weapons to its arsenal and has honed its existing weaponry.

The conventional wisdom is that the government has a significant advantage when challenging mergers in court, and that this advantage is especially difficult to overcome when the government presents major customer witnesses opposing the transaction. However, three recent government court losses in which the FTC or Department of Justice teamed up with state attorney generals challenge that conventional wisdom.

Of the firms that are playing to win, I particularly respect those that have gone out of their way to define what constitutes unethical and culturally unacceptable behavior.

Qualified retirement plans that provide immediate cash-out distributions to a terminated participant if the vested benefit is "$5000 or less" must be amended to comply with Department of Labor (DOL) final regulations. The final regulations are effective for rollovers of mandatory distributions made on or after March 28, 2005. The final regulations provide a safe harbor for fiduciaries of tax-qualified pension plans that are required to roll over plan benefits into an individual retirement plan when a terminated employee fails to elect a distribution method.

The Eighteenth Annual Conference & Workshops on Law Firm Management & Economics will be held in New Orleans, LA on March 17 and 18, 2005 at the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel.

In conducting strategic planning studies and facilitating numerous strategic planning retreats, I regularly discuss long-term trends affecting law firms with dozens of members of executive committees and managing partners. These trends of interest differ somewhat, of course, for firms of different sizes. More importantly, sometimes the same trend has very different implications for firms of different sizes.