Regulatory Enforcement Post-Election

The Trump administration will likely seek to scale back many forms of regulatory enforcement, but the President campaigned on a law-and-order platform, and that makes it likely that prosecutors will continue to focus on cases involving fraud, corruption and other offenses where it can be shown that individuals acted with clear criminal intent. The Yates Memo is unlikely to go the way of its putative author (Sally Yates, who was fired by Trump after she declined to enforce the first iteration of his travel ban). One area where enforcement is unlikely to abate, according to the authors of this Today’s General Counsel article, is the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Other areas to watch include a little noted provision in Sarbanes-Oxley that addresses so-called anticipatory obstruction of justice. This article includes strategies that in-house counsel can apply to protect their client in any case, including smarter compliance programs and an interesting and easily applicable strategy that’s sometimes called “the tenth man rule.”