After spending seven years as a proposal in limbo, the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") adopted a "Pay Versus Performance" rule in August of 2022, finally meeting the statutory mandate set forth in the Dodd-Frank Act. (Candance Quinn, et. al., Bloomberg Law). As the rule’s name implies, SEC registrants must now disclose the interplay between their executive compensation actually paid and the company's financial performance. (PricewaterhouseCoopers). An additional requirement under the new rule has drawn scrutiny as it opens the door for Environmental Social Governance ("ESG") disclosures to be made…
Read MoreAs the world's news cycle grows shorter by the day, events with wide-ranging consequences scarcely have a twenty-four-hour lifespan in the headlines. Few issues aside from COVID-19 and the Russian incursion into Ukraine exhibit staying power. Count the increasingly convoluted legal battle between the world's richest man, Elon Musk and Twitter, Inc. (“Twitter”) as one of these issues. (Forbes). Musk has been attempting for months to void his attempted Twitter takeover. (Giles Turner, Bloomberg). With new developments in the case making headlines every week, it is difficult to keep track of how the case began, where it stands, and the consequences of a ruling in what has turned into a high stakes tug of war…
Read MoreSenators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) introduced legislation on June 7, 2022 that would implement and divide oversight of the cryptocurrency market between the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”). (David A. Lopez-Kurtz, National Law Review; Soyoung Ho, Thomson Reuters). Proposed legislation of this kind may feel anathema to the underlying premise of blockchain technology and its freewheeling pioneers…
Read MoreThe rise of artificial intelligence (“A.I.”) and automated decision-making tools in making consumer-facing decisions led federal regulators, such as those at the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”), to identify bias in algorithms along with deceptive and manipulative conduct on the internet among their top regulatory priorities moving forward. (Ali Arain, et. al., Bloomberg Law). In particular, regulators seek to identify whether A.I. and algorithms exclude specific consumer groups in an unfair and discriminatory manner, whether data collection efforts accurately reflect real-world facts, and whether automated decision-making tools are used in a transparent manner. Id. The extent to which A.I. replicates human bias and what, if anything can be done about that, is a question regulators will need to grapple with in the coming years…
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