Archive for February, 2009

Louis Thompson, Jr. has an article in Compliance Week on using blogs for investor relations. Blogs: If Used Properly, an Investor-Friendly Tool (subscription required). Louis focuses on the Dell Shares blog used as an investor relations tool by Dell, Inc. and the GE Reports blog used by General Electric. Since this is a blog, I… » Read More

Mark E. Schreiber and Barbara A. Lee published an article on the New Liabilities and Policies for Incidental Private Use of Company Electronic Systems and PDAs. The discussion in the article comes from the decision in Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Company, Inc., 529 F.3d 892 (9th Cir. 2008). In that case the court found… » Read More

A federal court held that a former employee seeking on acted in good faith, but under an objective analysis, his belief that the company was engaged in fraud was not reasonable and upheld termination. Day v. Staples, Inc., 2009 WL 294804 (1st Cir. February 9, 2009) The employee complained that the company improperly handled regularly… » Read More

Felix Salmon published a great article in Wired that looks at the Recipe for Disaster: The Formula That Killed Wall Street. The article looks at the widespread use of the Gaussian copula function. In assessing the risks in mortgage backed securities. The theory behind Gaussian copula function tries to overcome the difficulty in assessing the… » Read More

LRN published their 2008 LRN Ethics and Compliance Risk Management Practices Report (.pdf) (free registration required)  The report is based on a survey of senior ethics, legal, risk and audit professionals, with 461 completed surveys. The key findings of the report: Ethics and compliance programs are maturing Companies identify their top two ethics and compliance… » Read More

Staples fired sales director Alan S. Noonan was fired for padding his expense report. Executive Vice President Jay Baitler sent an e-mail to approximately 1,500 employees explaining the reason for the firing. The e-mail contained no untruths, but Mr. Noonan sued for defamation anyhow. Unfortunately for Staples, truth is not a defense in Massachusetts if… » Read More

Rebecca Walker of Kaplan & Walker LLP is the author of a report on A Benchmarking Survey on Third-Party Codes of Conduct (register to download) sponsored by The Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics. The SCCE received survey results from more than 400 compliance professionals on how they deal with third-party compliance policies. As Rebecca… » Read More

After my webinar with Bruce Carton on Tuesday (Web 2.0: Leveraging new media to Maximize Your Securities and Compliance Practice), I ran across a three part series on Why Webinars Fail from Larry Kilbourne: Content Failures, Format Failures and,  Process Failures.  I hope we did not make too many of these mistakes: Cramming too much… » Read More

To those of you who use mobile devices, I have installed a plugin that makes it easier to read Compliance Building on your mobile device.  It looks great on my iPhone. At some point in the future I will add a little more pizzazz to the color scheme and maybe an image. It also renders… » Read More

As part of the enormous stimulus package in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the federal government included some relief for laid-off employees. Mark Spring discusses the COBRA subsidy in ARRA over at the California Labor and Employment Law Blog: The Stimulus Bill’s Impact on COBRA. The biggest change to COBRA is a… » Read More