This blog was originally published in Law360.
On November 18, 2022, U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila sentenced Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes to over 11 years in
Continue Reading When Organizational Culture Goes Wrong: A Federal Judge’s Vivid Description of Cultural Decay Inside Theranos
So, nearly 2 years ago your organization applied for and received COVID-relief funds. The decision was not an easy one. On the one hand, government largesse invariably comes with strings and uncertainties, i.e., risk. On the other hand, your organization faced an unprecedented triple threat crisis: financial, operational, and health. Consumer spending plummeted and its consequences rippled through the economy threatening to trigger a global financial meltdown. You could not possibly have forecast how the global pandemic would affect your organization.
If your company is like many, your board of directors may be demanding that you put more effort into environmental, social, and governance issues, which have become known by the now-ubiquitous acronym “ESG.” Those demands don’t come from nowhere: consumers are demanding transparency and social responsibility. In addition, if your company does business internationally, regulators are now focused on international social justice issues (such as the use of forced labor) more than ever.
Continue Reading Does Your Trade Policy Support Your Company’s Values?
This past month, the U.S. Senate debated a provision in the Innovation and Competition Act that would require the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to review any proposed gifts and contracts of $1 million or more to U.S. research institutions from a foreign source. That would mean that the U.S. government would have a new level of oversight of such gifts, be required to investigate the ultimate source of the funds, and be able to impose mitigation measures on or prohibit such gifts.
Continue Reading Open Research, Foreign Finance, and a University’s Mission
Corporate compliance programs are expected to be tailored to an organization’s unique risks. Most regulators (and most modern organizational compliance programs) prescribe risk-based compliance. But one thing is to prescribe; another is to execute properly.
Continue Reading Five Keys to a Successful Compliance Risk Assessment
This article was originally published on IP Watchdog.
An employee comes to you with a recipe for your competitor’s “secret sauce.” You know she worked for your competitor before coming to work for you. How do you respond? It’s an important question, because it may go to the core integrity of your organization and because exploring this trade secret conundrum may offer some decision-making principles that businesses can apply when addressing other difficult decisions that they are being called to make in these stressful COVID-19 times.
Continue Reading To Disclose Or Not To Disclose: Responding to Trade Secrets Misappropriation by an Employee?
The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown us all into a crisis of uncertainty. How does one stop a global pandemic? How long will it take to bend the contagion curve? How should the business community respond, to both the public health and financial challenges? How we as a nation, as individuals, and as businesses respond to these challenges, will reveal and test our values.
Continue Reading Leading with Values in Times of Crisis
This spring, two major sports teams were caught cheating. Both are consistent championship contenders in recent years.
In the United States, hardly any sports fan could have missed the report released by Major League Baseball concluding that the Houston Astros used cameras to steal signs from opposing pitchers, allowing Astros hitters to know what pitches were coming. The Astros exploited this scheme to win the World Series in 2017, reach the American League Championship in 2018, and reach the World Series again in 2019.[1]