Main Justice held the first annual Best FCPA Lawyers Client Service Awards on April 23, 2013, at The Hotel Monaco in Washington, D.C.
Main Justice's Dana Rossi moderates panel with Barrick Gold's Jonathan Drimmer and GE's Jeffrey Eglash.
The awards honored firms and attorneys who demonstrated exceptional client service in representing clients in FCPA and global anti-corruption matters over the past year. Between February and March 2013, Main Justice combed through law firm nomination submissions, gathered industry intelligence and conducted primary market research with 100 practitioners, in-house counsel and executives. The research consisted of a review of law firm submissions, in-person and telephone interviews, and an in-house counsel survey where executives could provide insights on an anonymous basis.
Law firm partners and counsel, in-house counsel and chief compliance officers revealed candid insights to Main Justice, including never before heard opinions on:
- How law firms are using origination credit and other incentive models to their distinct advantage to build FCPA practices;
- Seizing opportunities in China – the types of matters now emerging, and the rewards for law firm’s setting up offices around the country;
- Exclusive in-house survey results: what client development tools are hot and what’s not;
- The new standard for obtaining declinations;
- How firm’s are doubling their matters through smart compliance integration; and more!
The full guide including law firm nominee profiles will be published Monday, May 20.
The guide is complimentary to subscribers of Just Anti-Corruption (one per subscriber) or available for purchase for non-subscribers.
To learn more, contact Dana-Megan Rossi at drossi@mainjustice.com
President Barack Obama is standing by his Attorney General in the wake of widespread bipartisan criticism over the Justice Department’s move to secretly obtain two months of telephone records from the Associated Press.
“I have complete confidence in Eric Holder as Attorney General,” the president said yesterday at a joint press conference with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “He does his job with integrity and I expect he will continue to do so.”
This is the second time this week that the president has publicly backed Holder. White House press secretary, Jay Carney, issued a statement of support for Attorney General at his daily news conference on Tuesday.
Holder has weathered intense criticism in the past. Last year, a botched gun-walking investigation ultimately landing him in contempt of Congress. Previously, he has faced outrage over attempts to close the Guantanamo Bay military detention facility and to try suspected 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in federal court.
This latest scandal is unique in that it has angered both conservative and liberal commentators, some of whom have called for his resignation, as well as the mainstream media.
In addition to backing Holder, Obama also defended the Justice Department’s decision to subpoena the cellular, office and home telephone records of AP reporters in New York, Washington, and Hartford, Conn., apparently as part of a probe into the leak of news about a foiled terrorism plot in Yemen.
“You know, leaks related to national security can put people at risk,” Obama said. “It can put men and women in uniform that I’ve sent into the battlefield at risk. They can put some of our intelligence officers who are in various dangerous situations that are easily compromised at risk.”
This has been a rough week for the Attorney General, who faced off with lawmakers on Wednesday and has struggled to explain exactly when and under what circumstances he recused himself from a leak investigation.
When Attorney General Eric Holder walked into a hearing room in the Rayburn House office building yesterday, he must have expected that lawmakers would rake him over the coals for his department’s snooping on AP reporters, but he didn’t seem nervous. After all, this pageant of scandal and Congressional grilling has become routine for Holder, who has been a lightning rod since the first days of the Obama Administration.
After almost four and half years on the job, he’s been the first attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress, been called “rabidly un-American,” and even reportedly tried to resign. A LexisNexis search for “Eric Holder” “grilled” and “Congress” returns 534 articles. Attorneys general don’t often last two presidential terms. (Read more)
STANDING BEFORE reporters Thursday, President Obama declined an invitation to compare the recent scandals weighing down his administration with those that forced President Nixon to resign in 1974. So allow us to do the work for him: There is no comparison.
Nixon, in a series of crimes that collectively came to be known as Watergate, directed from the White House and Justice Department a concerted campaign against those he perceived as political enemies, in the process subverting the FBI, the IRS, other government agencies and the electoral process to his nefarious purposes. Mr. Obama has done nothing of the kind. Nor is there much to support a lesser “unifying theory” of this week’s scandals, which is that together they prove Mr. Obama guilty of a grand overreach of federal power. (Read more)
The Department of Justice’s witness protection program had national security vulnerabilities that allowed an unknown number of known and suspected terrorists whose names appeared on the government’s “no fly” list to take commercial flights, according to an interim Inspector General’s report released today.
“As a result of the department not disclosing information on these known or suspected terrorists, the new, government-provided identities of known or suspected terrorists were not included on the government’s consolidated terrorist watchlist until we brought this matter to the department’s attention,” according to the report by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. “Therefore, it was possible for known or suspected terrorists to fly on commercial airplanes in or over the United States and evade one of the government’s primary means of identifying and tracking terrorists’ movements and actions.”
After being told about the problem, DOJ established protocols to share with the FBI the identities of all suspected or known terrorist witnesses within the program. The bureau has been reviewing the names and as of July 2012, FBI officials have not found a national security threat posed by any of the individuals, according to the report.
Meanwhile, the report also noted that in July 2012, the U.S. Marshall Service, which operates the program, could not find two former members who were identified as known or suspected terrorists. DOJ officials told Main Justice in a conference call today that both individuals have since been found overseas.
The officials would not say how many of the more than 18,000 past and present members of the program had terrorism ties only that those admitted represent “a fraction of one percent of the total WitSec population, and the vast majority were admitted into the program prior to Sept. 11, 2001.”
Republicans immediately jumped on the findings.
“This is just another example of the Justice Department’s ineptness at the basic handling of an important program,” said Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “These people may be in a witness protection program, but they were still known or suspected terrorists. It’s only logical that the federal government know where they are.”
Grassley said the report further “raises concerns about what will happen if the Justice Department tries future terrorists in civilian courts.”
“Will the Attorney General be able to guarantee that future known or suspected terrorist witnesses are not a danger to Americans?”
DOJ defended the use of these witnesses, who they credit with aiding in a number of high-profile terrorism prosecutions and investigations, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 East Africa Embassy bombings, the “Blind Sheik” prosecutions and the the New York City subway suicide-bomb plot.
“The government choose its witnesses in these cases,” a DOJ official said earlier today. “During the last two decades, the witness security program has been a key tool in thwarting terrorism plots.”
Lawmakers are still navigating the tricky issue of where to place responsibility for anonymizing consumer data when businesses share cyber threat information with each other or the government, a subcommittee hearing made clear Thursday morning.
The issue is at the heart of the debate over how to bolster the country’s cybersecurity, since the private sector operates 85 percent of the nation’s so-called “critical infrastructure” — things like chemical plants and power grids — and nearly everyone agrees that businesses must heavily participate in a threat information sharing program in order to make it work.
Democrats argue that businesses should be responsible for getting rid of sensitive personal information before it ever gets to the government; Republicans counter that requiring businesses to strip personally identifiable information — and assume the legal liability for doing so — would discourage them from sharing any information in the first place. The issue is at the center of the White House’s veto threat on the House’s Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act.
That debate resumed this morning at a hearing held by the House Homeland Security’s subcommittee on cybersecurity, infrastructure protection, and security technologies. The panel was addressing the Department of Homeland Security’s role in protecting the country from a cyber attack. Three DHS officials testified about the department’s various cyber efforts.
Noting that DHS could help “facilitate communications among the sixteen critical infrastructure sectors,” Subcommittee Chairman Patrick Meehan (R-Penn.) argued that the agency should be charged with filtering out sensitive information.
“The Department of Homeland Security Privacy Office is the first statutorily required privacy office in any federal agency,” Meehan said. “The office is responsible for evaluating department operations for potential privacy impacts, and providing mitigation strategies to reduce the privacy impact.”
Democrats successfully pushed to make DHS the entry point for shared information during the debate over CISPA last month after voicing fears that personal information could end up in military hands. But Republicans have not budged on holding the government accountable for data minimization, on the grounds that placing another regulatory burden on businesses will doom the program.
The revolving door at the top of the DHS’ cybersecurity team also drew scrutiny at the hearing, given its growing role as the central hub for information sharing.
Invoking the departures in recent months of former Deputy Secretary Jane Holl Lute and former Deputy Undersecretary for Cybersecurity Mark Weatherford, ranking member Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) voiced concern over what she called the “continuing drain” on senior DHS officials devoted to cybersecurity.
“We have been hearing about the difficulties DHS faces in attracting and retaining skilled junior and mid-level cyber employees for a long time,” she said, “but what does it say about the Department’s cyber organization when it cannot retain its senior leaders, either?”
Clarke was referring to widely voiced concerns over the weakness of the country’s potential cyber workforce, a problem that has sparked a wave of creative recruitment efforts targeting gifted computer science students through events like “hackathon” tournaments.
“DHS needs to find leaders who believe in the mission and will stay on board as a steady hand on the wheel during this period of immense expansion and evolution of our cybersecurity efforts,” Clarke added. “As part of this process, I believe DHS needs to do some soul-searching and identify why their senior officials have been leaving.”
As the nation’s top law enforcement official, Eric Holder is privy to all kinds of sensitive information. But he seems to be proud of how little he knows.
Why didn’t his Justice Department inform the Associated Press, as the law requires, before pawing through reporters’ phone records? (Read more)
The press conference, scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday at the U.S. District Court in Hammond, Ind., will be the first one since an announcement in September that five public officials in Lake County were being charged with various tax charges. (Read more).
The Senate Judiciary Committee this morning unanimously approved Sri Srinivasan’s nomination for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, clearing the way for a vote by the full chamber.
The panel voted 18-0 to back the nominee, currently the principal deputy to the Solicitor General, who has become the public face of the White House’s push to fill one of four open seats on the D.C. Circuit with the shadow of former nominee Caitlin Halligan hanging over the nomination.
Srinivasan seems unlikely to face a similar fate having won the support of leading Republican senators, including ranking member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) .
Srinivasan, who would become the first appeals court judge of South Asian heritage, is already generating buzz as a potential Supreme Court nominee. His high-profile may have led to many of the senators in attendance to press him on his broader ideological philosophy.
Obama has called Srinivasan a “trailblazer,” saying he “will serve the court with distinction and excellence.”
From 1995 to 1996, Srinivasan served as a law clerk on the D.C. Circuit, and then spent a year as a Bristow Fellow in the Office of the Solicitor General before clerking for Justice O’Connor. Srinivasan was hired as an associate at O’Melveny & Myers LLP from 1998 until 2002.
In 2002, he returned to the Solicitor General’s Office as an Assistant to the Solicitor General.
He left the government in 2007 and rejoined O’Melveny as a partner. Then, in August 2011, he came back to the Office of the Solicitor General as the principal deputy.
Srinivasan received his B.A. from Stanford University in 1989 and his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1995. He also holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
