It’s hard to believe that with all the resources poured into government following the adoption of Sarbanes Oxley Act in 2002, the escalation process in the SEC failed in the Madoff case. New reports show that junior SEC staff neglected to involve more seasoned enforcement officers and failed to stop what ended up to [...] Read Full Story

If you’ve heard of cloud computing and all the security issues that surround it, and if you’re wondering if you should trust the security of your sensitive and confidential data to a third party service provider, well, all I can say is that you’re like the old timer who hoards his wad of cash in [...] Read Full Story

By Michael Kozubek Published in the 2/1/2009 Issue of Inside Counsel. Privilege review has been a major culprit in the skyrocketing cost of e-discovery. With hundreds of thousands of documents subject to discovery in numerous cases, attorney-client communications and work-product information frequently end up in the hands of the opposing party. Because the production of privileged documents during [...] Read Full Story

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Federal Trade Commission today announced that CVS, the nation’s largest retail pharmacy chain, will pay the U.S. government a $2.25 million settlement and take corrective action to ensure it does not violate the privacy of its millions of patients when disposing of patient information such [...] Read Full Story

Joe Palazzolo Legal Times Federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday they are targeting lawyers, mortgage brokers, real estate brokers and other “gatekeepers” who perpetrated fraud that contributed to the current economic crisis — a clear warning shot as the federal government is pumping billions of dollars into the financial sector. “They have the most to lose, they’re the [...] Read Full Story

Lexakos asked law department leaders again about their concerns, priorities and resource allocation plans for 2009. This year’s benchmarking survey covers reporting metrics, outsource planning for IP and litigation, budget pressures, e-discovery, privilege waiver management in relation to new Federal Evidence Rule 502, and other compliance priorities. In 2007 and 2008, Compliance Week, the leading publication and [...] Read Full Story

Richard Adhikari One year after trying unsuccessfully to introduce legislation on data breaches and protection of individual privacy, California Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) is trying again. This week, she introduced Bills S.139, the Notification of Risk to Personal Data Act and S.141, the Social Security Number Misuse Prevention Act. Bill S.139 would require federal agencies or businesses to [...] Read Full Story

As much as the legal sector experiences a change in momentum, such a change seems to be occurring now. Last week, The Am Law Daily picked up on a piece penned by Cravath, Swaine & Moore’s Evan Chesler in the latest issue of Forbes magazine, entitled “Time to Kill the Billable Hour.” Cravath’s presiding partner, in [...] Read Full Story

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has proposed a new standard for public disclosure of pending lawsuits. This raises interesting legal technology and management questions for general counsels. Reporting Rights in the January 2009 issue of InsideCounsel reports on FASB Statements No. 5 and 141[R]. These now-delayed rules would lower “the threshold for reporting the [...] Read Full Story

By Christine Taylor, January 9, 2008, 12:10 PM A few years ago, the Taneja Group coined the term “Information Classification and Management” (ICM) to describe the technology of locating and classifying data throughout the enterprise. ICM covered sub-technology sectors such as e-discovery, compliance, data security control, and data management. However, we saw the term “e-discovery” trump [...] Read Full Story