E-mail: The Prosecutor's New Best Friend
Over the past 10 years, e-mail has replaced the telephone as the favored method of communication within Fortune 500 companies. The typical employee might send or receive dozens of e-mails per day, with the amount of e-mail traffic growing exponentially the higher up the employee sits on the corporate ladder. In a large company, the CEO might receive hundreds of e-mails daily, leaving to an assistant the task of 'screening' them. This explosive growth in e-mail has not been lost on prosecutors. In case after case, prosecutors are securing convictions with carelessly written e-mail.
The Incredible Shrinking Privilege
The headlines reporting multi-million dollar corporate guilty pleas often miss a point widely understood among white-collar practitioners: The driving force behind the corporate plea is often not the merits of the government's charge, but the corporation's need to reach a global settlement resolving administrative and criminal sanctions that could put the company out of business.
Sarbanes-Oxley: A Wake-up Call for Labor
Legislative winds are now stirring to strengthen financial accountability in labor organizations by amending their financial disclosure requirements and by arming the Department of Labor with greater enforcement tools. Labor leaders should learn from the failures of their business counterparts, and not wait for labor scandals to cause a legislative backlash like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Targeting Mutual Funds
Successful enforcement efforts against investment banks have emboldened state and federal authorities to target the next deep pocket in the securities industry: mutual funds, or more precisely, the funds' investment advisers. There are over 10,000 mutual funds in the United States today, with approximately $7 trillion in investments from approximately 83 million individual investors.
Hacker Attack: Data Loss Considered Covered Property Under First-Party Policy
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit has recently weighed in on the applicability of standard-form, first-party property policies to the loss of computer data, finding such data loss resulting from a hacker attack by a former employee of the insured to be covered property damage. <i>NMS Services, Inc. v. The Hartford,</i> No. 01-2491, 2003 WL 1904413 (4th Cir., April 21, 2003)
No Electronic Theft Act Is A Partial Success
In 1997, the No Electronic Theft Act radically changed the underpinnings of criminal copyright infringement. Before the act, criminal copyright infringement targeted infringers making profits. The act focuses instead on copyright owners' losses, treating criminal copyright infringement as a type of theft ' like shoplifting.