A key session of the Commercial Litigation Summit tackled aspects of global investigations from an in-house and external adviser perspective. Clifford Chance partner Judith Seddon began by looking at deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and self-reporting. She posed the question: ‘How effective are DPAs in changing corporate behaviour? From a corporate-governance perspective, does the failure-to-prevent offence …
Look out law schools, there is a disrupter in town. Naturally, that town is Silicon Valley, the home of innovation. And the innovator in question is University of California Berkeley, which includes a leading US law school, renowned for its prowess in technology and IP.
Unusually for the current UK and Ireland general counsel of Swiss multinational and famed KitKat creator Nestlé, Mark Maurice-Jones’ career started in teaching. Armed with a chemical engineering degree from the University of Cambridge that he was unsure how to utilise, Maurice-Jones opted for a year-and-a-half-long stint in Hong Kong teaching maths, physics and chemistry. …
National Grid renews roster National Grid, which carried out its last full panel review in 2015, has reappointed 12 firms to its roster including Norton Rose Fulbright, Addleshaw Goddard, Irwin Mitchell and Herbert Smith Freehills. These firms, which were newly appointed in 2015, join CMS Cameron McKenna Nabarro Olswang, DLA Piper, Eversheds Sutherland, Linklaters, Berwin …
The discovery of serious criminal conduct within an organisation can be catastrophic and at the very least present a major distraction from the company’s core business.
Austrian law regards directors and officers as fiduciaries of their respective company (or rather: its shareholders). This is because, as a basic principle, executives do not usually manage their own assets but rather assets belonging to third parties.
David Boyd, partner in Eversheds Sutherland Consulting and previous head of banking for the firm talks about the changes in the legal market and how solutions deemed ‘new law’ are becoming the future in the way legal teams work.
For 35 years the standard test for dishonesty in criminal trials has been that set out by the Court of Appeal in R v Ghosh. But last month, the Supreme Court overturned this authority in obiter comments in the judgment of Ivey v Genting Casinos. We examine the reasoning behind this decision and its likely …
Continue reading “White-collar crime: law on dishonesty re-written”
Political and public pressures continue to drive significant changes in the approach to criminal corporate enforcement throughout the world. The UK has proved no exception and in September 2017 the Criminal Finances Act 2017 created another strict liability criminal offence for businesses, for failing to prevent facilitation of UK or foreign tax evasion.
When a company learns that there may have been serious misconduct within the organisation, one option is for it to conduct its own internal investigation to establish what has happened, who is liable and how to make sure that it does not happen again. A company investigation may take place either instead of or in …