Executives In The Crosshairs: Unpacking The Yates Memo

A legal alert from McGuire Woods, following the release earlier this month of the Yates Memo, in which the Justice Department said it wanted its attorneys to hold individuals responsible in both criminal and civil cases involved corporate misconduct. In fact this memo is the latest in a succession of DOJ pronouncements about its interest in targeting individuals, the authors write. What real changes in policy it bodes is unclear, but what is clear is that carrying out internal investigations is likely to become more difficult because of greater difficulty in getting cooperation from individual executives. “The Yates Memo,” they write, “provides a telling insight into DOJ’s current policy objective: reach the highest-level business leaders through cooperation deals with lower-ranking executives.”