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Recent rulings of importance to your practice.

Features

Analysis of recent rulings you need to know.

The Enron, Tyco and WorldCom scandals have greatly heightened the fiduciary duties of directors and officers and the scrutiny paid to them. The spotlight on corporations and their managers is likely to shine brightly for years to come. This article offers ten practical tips for handling sensitive investigations in an era where shareholders, prosecutors, regulators and courts are likely to scrutinize the response of organizations to inevitable episodes of suspected corporate misconduct.

Most defense attorneys enter into joint-defense agreements with the understanding that even if one of the signatories decides to withdraw from the agreement and cooperate with the government, the confidentiality provisions survive. Two recent decisions ' by the Eleventh Circuit and the Northern District of California ' have called provisions like these into question: <i>United States v. Almeida</i>, 341 F.3d 1318 (11th Cir. 2003); and <i>United States v. Stepney</i>, 246 F. Supp.2d 1069 (N.D. Cal. 2003). Any defense attorney who is considering entering into such an agreement should think twice &amp;emdash; especially if some party may choose, down the road, to cooperate with the government.

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When management or the Board of Directors suspects possible misconduct within the company, they cannot respond with sound business judgment unless they have good information about what happened. In serious cases, they probably need outside counsel to investigate, report, and recommend remedies. The government has long encouraged companies to disclose the results of these internal investigations by offering the hope of leniency in charging or sentencing. On Sept. 22, 2003, the Attorney General added a "stick" to this "carrot" approach when he announced the Justice Department's new policy of charging the most serious criminal offenses that are readily provable, with a limited exception in cases where a defendant provided substantial assistance.

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Attorney General John Ashcroft said recently that law-enforcement agents had arrested 125 suspects in a crackdown on Internet crimes ranging from hacking to fraud to selling stolen goods. The seven-week cybercrime sweep involved police from Ghana to Southern California and uncovered 125,000 victims who had lost more than $100 million, he told a news conference.

In deciding to review the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act, the U.S. Supreme Court will revisit Congress' efforts to protect children…

The latest on legislation affecting the Internet.