SEC Expected to Follow DOJ in Scaling Back FCPA Enforcement, Experts Say

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission will likely follow the Department of Justice in scaling back investigations of and civil actions against alleged foreign bribery violations, legal observers said.

Since May, the SEC has closed at least two Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations into research firm Inotiv and GE Healthcare. The commission also announced last month that it was dismissing, for policy reasons, an FCPA lawsuit against two former chief executive officers of information technology company Cognizant after the DOJ dropped criminal charges.

President Donald Trump has made reducing FCPA enforcement a priority at the DOJ but has not directly addressed the SEC. Trump signed an executive order in February pausing FCPA actions at the DOJ until the agency issued revised enforcement guidelines regarding the statute.

Project Crypto

Two points here. One is that this seems to me to be the substantively correct approach: Many crypto projects are securities-ish, so investors should have securities-ish protections, but they are not quite the same thing as stock, and those protections should be tailored to what they are. Under Gensler, the SEC occasionally hinted that it might help token issuers to register their offerings, but its actions were pretty resolutely hostile. Atkins’s statements suggest that the SEC might actually make it feasible to register crypto tokens, which is probably the right approach.

The other point is that this is definitely, in 2025, the correct approach for the SEC as a matter of politics. The Gensler SEC took the approach of “crypto tokens are securities, so they are under the SEC’s jurisdiction, and the SEC will outlaw them.” I think there is a real appeal to that position (lots of dumb stuff in crypto!), but that ship has sailed and crypto is way too globally influential to just ban it in the US. The SEC is in many ways the best agency to regulate crypto — because crypto tokens are obviously securities-like, and because the SEC has long experience in investor protection, disclosure regulation and trading supervision — but it has to affirmatively apply for the job….

Lawyers Are Earning $30 Million and Billing Rates are Soaring

Lawyers have always been well paid, but the riches now available to top performers would make most Premier League soccer players blush, with some legal rainmakers reportedly earning more than $30 million a year.

While the leading firms are incredibly profitable, I’m not alone in wondering whether the pay boom is sustainable. Skyrocketing compensation risks destabilizing law firms and leaving clients feeling shortchanged, while further undermining the idea of law as a profession rather than a commercial enterprise.

Driven by a Darwinian war for talent, amid a boom in private markets and rising financial and regulatory complexity, corporate law firms are paying more and more to attract star performers and prevent defections.

The Real Life of a CEO: Modern Day Issues Regarding Security, Accessibility and Travel Expectations

SEC regulations should reflect the realities of the present.

My Baker McKenzie partner and corporate governance expert Jennifer Broder and I made this submission, “The Real Life of a CEO: Modern Day Issues Regarding Security, Accessibility and Travel Expectations,” to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and its recent roundtable revisting the Executive Compensation disclosure rules.

Jennifer and I note that the rules on executive perquisites are outdated. For instance, it is archaic to think that 24 hours personal security for a CEO is a “perk” as opposed to an unfortunate necessity for the job in today’s threat environment.

And corporate boards may want their CEOs, who are expected to be available 24/7, to travel in private planes as a work necessity to maintain cybersecurity in addition to personal safety.

Peanut Butter & Watermelon: Financial Privacy in the Digital Age

We should take concrete steps to protect people’s ability not only to communicate privately, but to transfer value privately, as they could have done with physical coins in the days in which the Fourth Amendment was crafted. A recent President’s Working Group included the following pertinent recommendation: “American citizens and businesses should be able to own digital assets and use blockchain technologies for lawful purposes without fear of prosecution. Likewise, American entrepreneurs and software developers should have the liberty, and regulatory certainty, to upgrade all sectors of our economy using these technologies.” As that recommendation suggests, we should welcome privacy-protecting technologies and safeguard the right of individuals to self-custody their crypto assets. And developers of open-source privacy software should not have to answer for the actions that other people take using the software they wrote. Although a centralized intermediary or even a DAO deploying a DeFi application could build in restrictions on its use, an immutable, open-source protocol is available for anyone’s use in perpetuity, so requiring that it comply with financial surveillance measures is fruitless. We should not ask peers transacting with one another, where no intermediary exists, to collect and report information on each other. Doing so would deputize us to surveil our neighbors—a practice antithetical to a free society….