Conglomerate Blog: Business, Law, Economics & Society

January 23, 2015

How We Should Have Tried Monsignor Lynn

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My previous blogposts (one, two, three, and four) introduced why conspiracy prosecutions should be used to reach wrongdoing by agents within a business organization. The same legal analysis applies to religious organizations.

We should have been able to charge Monsignor Lynn and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that directed his actions to hide the sexual abuse by priests with criminal conspiracy. Instead, Pennsylvania charged Lynn with two things: child endangerment and conspiracy with the priests.

As international news outlets later reported, Lynn could not be guilty of child endangerment because the state’s statute could not apply to an administrative church official who did not directly supervise children.

Lynn could not be guilty of conspiracy with the priests because he did not share their “particular criminal intent.” As the jury understood, Lynn was not trying to help a predator priest get from parish to parish so that “he can continue to enjoy what he likes to do.” Lynn was trying to protect the reputation of his employer, the Archdiocese—if the priests benefitted, that was a side issue.

So why didn’t the prosecution charge Lynn and the Archdiocese with conspiracy? It was the Archdiocese that directly coordinated and profited from Lynn’s actions. The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine, as discussed before, would bar that prosecution. In Pennsylvania, it is “well-settled that a corporation cannot conspire with its subsidiary, its agents, or its employees.”

Finally, considering other options, Lynn could not have been charged with possible crimes such as obstruction of justice. Lynn was too good: Lynn and the Archdiocese were so successful at covering up the sexual abuse and silencing victims, there was no ongoing investigation to obstruct. “Aiding and abetting” the Archdiocese’s cover-up of the sex abuse would have been difficult to pursue (see more here) and is not allowed under RICO in the Third Circuit.

My next blogpost will demonstrate that the Monsignor Lynn case was also part of a pattern by the Roman Catholic Church in America to use the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine to hide the coordinated wrongdoing of its agents to cover-up sexual abuse by priests. Fifteen years before prosecutors attempted to try Monsignor Lynn, the silenced Connecticut sex-abuse case showed the Church how effective this defense could be.

January 22, 2015

Sex Abuse, Priests, and Corporate Conspiracy

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My previous blogposts (one, two, and three) introduced the topic of how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine prevents the prosecution of coordinated wrongdoing by individuals within organizations. This post illustrates the doctrine’s effect in the context of a specific organization—here a religious one: the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia and the systematic transfer of predator priests. This post is based on my article The Intracorporate Conspiracy Trap to be published soon in the Cardozo Law Review. The article is available in draft form here.

For twelve years, from 1992 to 2004, as Secretary for Clergy, Monsignor William Lynn’s job within the Philadelphia Archdiocese was to supervise priests, including the investigation of sex-abuse claims. In 1994, Monsignor Lynn compiled a list of thirty-five “predator” priests within the archdiocese. He compiled the list from secret church files containing hundreds of child sex-abuse complaints. On the stand, Lynn testified that he hoped that the list would help his superiors to address the growing sex-abuse crisis within the Archdiocese. But for twelve years Lynn merely re-assigned suspected priests, and he hid the abuse within the church. His superiors never acted on the list that Lynn gave them—in fact, they ordered all copies of the list destroyed—and Lynn never contacted outside authorities. As late as 2012, one of the “predator” priests on Lynn’s list was still serving in a parish.

All parties agree that Lynn’s actions in transferring priests who molested children allowed those priests to continue to abuse children, sheltered the priests from potential prosecution, and directly protected the Philadelphia Archdiocese’s reputation.

In fact, Lynn’s actions had been ordered by the archbishop on behalf of the Archdiocese. Lynn reported what he was doing to his superiors, who rewarded Lynn with twelve years of employment and a prominent position within the Archdiocese for doing his job as they saw it. Moreover, the archbishop himself inadvertently revealed the existence of the number thirty-five “predator” priests to the media, and he was the one who ordered all copies of the list to be shredded to keep it from being discovered in legal proceedings.

The instinct here is that this behavior—the transferring of predator priests to cover-up the sexual abuse of children—should have been illegal for Monsignor Lynn to pursue. But the Commonwealth could not prosecute Monsignor Lynn and the Archdiocese for conspiracy. Furthermore, immunity for Lynn’s behavior is now the rule in most state and federal jurisdictions around the country. As described in an earlier blogpost, the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine provides immunity to an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution, based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy.

My next blogpost will further investigate why this behavior was not illegal under our current system, and how we should have tried Monsignor Lynn.

January 21, 2015

Where are the Prosecutions for Corporate Conspiracy?

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

My first and second blogposts introduced why conspiracy prosecutions are particularly important for reaching the coordinated actions of individuals when the elements of wrong-doing may be delegated among members of the group.

So where are the prosecutions for corporate conspiracy??? The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 (“RICO”, 18 U.S.C.A. §§ 1961 et seq.), no longer applies to most business organizations and their employees. In fact, business organizations working together with outside agents can form new protected “enterprises.”

What’s going on here? In this area and many other parts of the law, we are witnessing the power of the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine. This doctrine provides immunity to an enterprise and its agents from conspiracy prosecution, based on the legal fiction that an enterprise and its agents are a single actor incapable of the meeting of two minds to form a conspiracy. According to the most recent American Law Reports survey, the doctrine “applies to corporations generally, including religious corporations and municipal corporations and other governmental bodies. The doctrine applies to all levels of corporate employees, including a corporation’s officers and directors and owners who are individuals.” Moreover, it now extends from antitrust throughout tort and criminal law.

What is the practical effect of this doctrine? The intracorporate conspiracy doctrine has distorted agency law and inappropriately handicaps the ability of tort and criminal law to regulate the behavior of organizations and their agents. Obedience to a principal (up to a point) should be rewarded in agency law. But the law should not immunize an agent who acts in the best interest of her employer to commit wrongdoing. Not only does the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine immunize such wrongdoing, but the more closely that an employer orders and supervises the employee’s illegal acts, the more the employer is protected from prosecution as well.

My next blogpost illustrates how the intracorporate conspiracy doctrine operates to defeat prosecutions for coordinated wrongdoing by agents within an organization. Let’s examine the case of Monsignor Lynn.

January 20, 2015

Corporate Conspiracy Charges for the Financial Crisis

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

In my previous blogpost, I granted the merit of defense counsel’s argument that the actions of discrete individual defendants—when the law is not permitted to consider the coordination of those actions—may not satisfy the elements of a prosecutable crime.

But what is the coordination of individuals for a wrongful common purpose? That’s a conspiracy. And, for exactly the reasons that defense counsel articulates, these types of crimes cannot be reached by other forms of prosecution. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that conspiracy is its own animal. “[C]ollective criminal agreement—partnership in crime—presents a greater potential threat to the public than individual delicts.” When we consider the degree of coordination necessary to create the financial crisis, we are not talking about a single-defendant mugging in a back alley—we are talking about at least the multi-defendant sophistication of a bank robbery.

Conspiracy prosecutions for the financial crisis have some other important features. First, the statute of limitations would run from the last action of a member of the group, not the first action as would be typical of other prosecutions. This means that many crimes from the financial crisis could still be prosecuted (answering Judge Rakoff’s concern). Second, until whistle-blower protections are improved to the point that employees with conscientious objections to processes can be heard, traditional conspiracy law provides an affirmative defense to individuals who renounce the group conspiracy. By contrast, the lesson Wall Street seems to have learned from the J.P. Morgan case is not to allow employees to put objections into writing. Third, counter to objections that conspiracy prosecutions may be too similar to vicarious liability, prosecutors would have to prove that each member of the conspiracy did share the same common intent to commit wrongdoing. The employee shaking his head “no” while saying yes would not be a willing participant, but many other bankers were freely motivated by profit at the expense of client interest to cooperate with a bank’s program.

My next blogpost will ask: where are the prosecutions for corporate conspiracy?

Litigating The Financial Crisis, By Moi

Posted by David Zaring

I've written a paper on the judicial history of the financial crisis, and it's now out in the Virginia Law Review, and up on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

The government’s response to the financial crisis was dramatic, enormous, and unprecedented, and nothing about it has been overseen by the courts. In our federal system, the courts are supposed to put the policies of presidents and congresses to the test of judicial review, to evaluate decisions by the executive to sanction individuals for wrongdoing, and to resolve disputes between private parties. But during and after the financial crisis, there has been almost none of that sort of judicial review of government, few sanctions on the private sector for conduct during the crisis, especially criminal ones, for the courts to scrutinize, and a private dispute process that, while increasingly active, has resulted in settlements, rather than trials or verdicts. This Article tells the story of the marginal role of courts in the financial crisis, evaluates the costs of that role, and provides suggestions to ensure a real, if not all-encompassing, judicial role during the next economic emergency.

Do give it a download, and let me know what you think. And thanks in advance for supporting us around here - we do like downloads!

J.P. Morgan’s Witness and the Holes in Corporate Criminal Law

Posted by Josephine Sandler Nelson

It is a pleasure to be guest-blogging here at The Glom for the next two weeks. My name is Josephine Nelson, and I am an advisor for the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford’s business school. Coming from a business school, I focus on practical applications at the intersection of corporate law and criminal law. I am interested in how legal rules affect ethical decisions within business organizations. Many thanks to Dave Zaring, Gordon Smith, and the other members of The Glom for allowing me to share some work that I have been doing. For easy reading, my posts will deliberately be short and cumulative.

In this blogpost, I raise the question of what is broken in our system of rules and enforcement that allows employees within business organizations to escape prosecution for ethical misconduct.

Public frustration with the ability of white-collar criminals to escape prosecution has been boiling over. Judge Rakoff of the S.D.N.Y. penned an unusual public op-ed in which he objected that “not a single high-level executive has been successfully prosecuted in connection with the recent financial crisis.” Professor Garett’s new book documents that, between 2001 and 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) failed to charge any individuals at all for crimes in sixty-five percent of the 255 cases it prosecuted.

Meanwhile, the typical debate over why white-collar criminals are treated so differently than other criminal suspects misses an important dimension to this problem. Yes, the law should provide more support for whistle-blowers. Yes, we should put more resources towards regulation. But also, white-collar defense counsel makes an excellent point that there were no convictions of bankers in the financial crisis for good reason: Prosecutors have been under public pressure to bring cases against executives, but those executives must have individually committed crimes that rise to the level of a triable case.

And why don’t the actions of executives at Bank of America, Citigroup, and J.P. Morgan meet the definition of triable crimes? Let’s look at Alayne Fleischmann’s experience at J.P. Morgan. Fleischmann is the so-called “$9 Billion Witness,” the woman whose testimony was so incriminating that J.P. Morgan paid one of the largest fines in U.S. history to keep her from talking. Fleischmann, a former quality-control officer, describes a process of intimidation to approve poor-quality loans within the bank that included an “edict against e-mails, the sabotaging of the diligence process,… bullying, [and] written warnings that were ignored.” At one point, the pressure from superiors became so ridiculous that a diligence officer caved to a sales executive to approve a batch of loans while shaking his head “no” even while saying yes.

None of those actions in the workplace sounds good, but are they triable crimes??? The selling of mislabeled securities is a crime, but notice how many steps a single person would have to take to reach that standard. Could a prosecutor prove that a single manager had mislabeled those securities, bundled them together, and resold them? Management at the bank delegated onto other people elements of what would have to be proven for a crime to have taken place. So, although cumulatively a crime took place, it may be true that no single executive at the bank committed a triable crime.

How should the incentives have been different? My next blogpost will suggest the return of a traditional solution to penalizing coordinated crimes: conspiracy prosecutions for the financial crisis.

December 17, 2014

The Revolving Door And Steve Cohen

Posted by David Zaring

The Times reports:

The billionaire investor, who managed to fend off a criminal insider trading investigation of himself, if not of his former hedge fund, is looking for a former prosecutor and several agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to join his new $10 billion investment firm, Point72 Asset Management, said several people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Look, one of the reasons to feel good about the revolving door is that it salts financial institutions with people who expect law compliance. So maybe that explains this development, and we should celebrate Cohen's search for g-men. Or maybe it is, as the Times reports, that he was heartened by the insider trading ruling of the Second Circuit requiring the trader to know both that he was trading on inside information and that the information was obtained in exchange for a benefit, and just wants to grow the enterprise on a number of different fronts.

I'm not sure he should be too heartened by that ruling. It only may free one of his convicted lieutenants, and certainly wouldn't do anything about Matthew Martoma, who both paid for and traded on information provided by a pharma insider.

October 27, 2014

The SEC's Anti-No-Admit Policy Only Goes So Far

Posted by David Zaring

It is one data point, but the cases where the the SEC would settle without requiring an admission of guilt or statement of facts were always likely to be those civil suits following criminal cases that did not go well. Rengan Rajnaratnam, Raj's brother, proved to be the one inside trader defendant that the Manhattan USAO could not convict. So the SEC is picking up sticks as well, in exchange for $840,000 bucks and a "let's just move on" kind of attitude. It's the kind of case where seeking an admission would likely just make the defendants dig in their heels, as I suggested here. And indeed, here's Rengan's lawyer, sounding threatening:

“The S.E.C. elected to offer, and Rengan elected to accept, a no admit/no deny settlement,” said Daniel Gitner, a lawyer for Mr. Rengan. “Rengan is moving on to the next phase of his life. If the S.E.C. has further comment, so will we.”

August 20, 2014

Trying To Understand New York State's Regulation Of Business

Posted by David Zaring

You'd think that the state that's home to the center of American business would take a Delaware-style light touch approach to overseeing it. But instead, the New York paradigm is to take ambitious politiicans, blend with broadly worded supervisory or anti-fraud statutes like the Martin Act, and come up with stuff that, to my ears, sounds almost every time like it is off-base, at least in the details. So:

Eliot Spitzer pursued research analysts for the sin of sending cynical emails even though they issued buy recommendations, despite that fact that analysts never issue negative recommendations, and if cynical emails are a crime, law professors are the most guilty people in the world.
I still don't understand what Maurice Greenberg, risk worrier par excellence, did wrong when he was running AIG. I do know that after he was forced out by Spitzer, the firm went credit default swap crazy.
Maybe there's something to the "you didn't tell your investors that you changed the way you did risk management for your mortgage program" prosecutions, but you'll note that it is not exactly the same thing as "you misrepresented the price and/or quality of the mortgage products you sold" prosecutions, which the state has not pursued.
Eric Schneiderman's idea that high frequency trading is "insider trading 2.0" is almost self-evidently false, as it is trading done by outsiders.
Federal regulators wouldn't touch Ben Lawsky's mighty serious claims that HSBC or BNP Paribas were basically enabling terrorist financing.
And now Lawsky is going after consultants for having the temerity to share a report criticizing the bank that hired them to review its own anti-money laundering practices with the bank, who pushed back on some, but not all of the conclusions.

The easiest way to understand this is to assume that AGs don't get to be governor (and bank supervisors don't get to be AGs) unless people wear handcuffs, and this is all a Rudy Giuliani approach to white collar wrongdoing by a few people who would like to have Rudy Giuliani's career arc.

But another way to look at it is through the dictum that the life of the law is experience, not logic. The details are awfully unconvincing. But these New York officials have also been arguing:

Having analysts recommending IPO purchases working for the banks structuring the IPO is dodgy.
HFT is front-running, and that's dodgy.
This new vogue for bank consulting is dodgy, particularly if it's just supposed to be a way for former bank regulators to pitch current bank regulators on leniency.
If we can't understand securitization gobbledegook, we can at least force you to employ a burdensome risk management process to have some faith that you, yourself, understand it.
And I'm not saying I understand the obsession with terrorism financing or what the head of AIG did wrong.

Their approach is the kind of approach that would put a top banker in jail, or at least on the docket, for the fact that banks presided over a securitization bubble in the run-up to the crisis. It's the "we don't like it, it's fishy, don't overthink it, you're going to pay for it, and you'll do so publicly" approach. It's kind of reminiscent of the saints and sinners theory of Delaware corporate governance. And it's my pet theory defending, a little, what otherwise looks like a lot of posturing.

July 10, 2014

Daniel Gitner And The Litigator Star System

Posted by David Zaring

Daniel Gitner got a splashy profile in the Times today in celebration of his recent trial acquiting Rengen Rajnaratnam, and congratulations to him. My theory of white collar/defense lawyer eminence is that often, you don't have to win to be able to market yourself. You were "picked by Martha Stewart," or "represented General Motors during the financial crisis," or "handle pro bono representations for five detainees in Guantanamo." See? It sounds like you're important. You're so good you drew the assignment.

Still, you probably won't get a Times profile when you lose those cases. Gitner won, and drew a reporter who didn't appear to like him much. He forbade his staff to get haircuts during the trial for some uninteresting lucky rabbit foot related reasons, and generally came across as intense but yet very platitudinous.

That right there isn't bad marketing either, though. My lawyer is a pain but leaves no stone unturned; it's practically in the job description. And now Gitner gets to add that he's the only person to win an insider trading case in the Bharara era; he did two things right there. First, he persuaded the jury to absolve his client of the one marginal count the judge didn't dismiss, and second, he got the judge to dismiss the two serious counts. It could be his briefwriting, rather than his bedside manner, that did the trick here - that, at least is what Matt Levine thinks.

March 28, 2014

Laying Blame And The Gupta Appeal

Posted by David Zaring

Over at DealBook, I've got a look at the low-key rejection of Rajat Gupta's criminal appeal:

Judge Jed Rakoff, who presided over Mr. Gupta’s trial, demanded in another case that the government proffer “cold, hard, solid facts, established either by admissions or by trials” in enforcement proceedings against financial firms. He has called for more prosecutions over the crisis, and expressed a desire to see wrongdoing exposed in court. Other trial judges have also expressed some sympathy for public sanctions expressed through judicial orders.

But powerful and influential appellate judges have indicated less interest in sending this sort of a message. The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit indicated in another case that it thought that Judge Rakoff had been too insistent on admissions of wrongdoing. And, as the opinion in Mr. Gupta’s appeal suggests, the court seems disinclined to make strong statements about appropriate business conduct when it could do so.

For more, head that way!

March 18, 2014

When Corruption and Social Enterprise Collide

Posted by Joseph Yockey

In addition to social enterprise, I’m also interested in how foreign corruption affects corporate governance and compliance. One of my current projects involves looking at where these areas intersect.

I was drawn to this topic because the developing world is often where social enterprises can do the most good, but, sadly, the developing world is also where corruption tends to be the most prevalent. Can a social enterprise do business in a country where nearly every public official demands bribes? Most traditional corporations will probably answer that question in the affirmative. A transnational oil and gas firm, for example, ought to have the resources to resist or at least mitigate the compliance challenges presented by corruption. Moreover, some traditional firms will likely approach corruption from a strictly economic perspective. The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) prohibits firms from paying bribes to foreign officials for the purpose of getting business. Firms that violate the statute face stiff monetary and reputational sanctions. But if the risk of detection is low and the potential gains from a corrupt transaction are high, managers could be tempted to go ahead and make a payoff to improve the financial bottom line.

The issue arguably becomes more complex in the case of a social enterprise. Social enterprises seek first and foremost to create a public benefit. Their managers must balance the mission and profit goals of socially oriented investors, employees, and other stakeholders. Accordingly, the question of whether to bribe is not simply a matter of weighing detection probabilities and potential gains. Managers will also need to anticipate, assess, and work through the ancillary effects of corruption—including market distortion, erosion of the rule of law, and negative effects on employee morale—when making decisions.

Perhaps some social-enterprise managers will elect to pay bribes on the theory that they will be serving the greater good by getting their products to those in need. They might conclude that the harms and enforcement risks from bribery are worth the benefit of providing people with, say, healthier sanitation options or cheaper energy. Others, though, will surely resist bribery altogether on moral or social welfare grounds. For these managers, the question becomes whether they can remain in markets with endemic corruption. This is a tough situation. If social enterprises decide to withdraw or otherwise limit their activities in certain markets, the obvious downside is their inability to positively affect citizens in distress. Whether other actors will step in and fill the gaps they leave behind is an open question.

March 16, 2014

It Turns Out Litigators Are Being Hired For Internal Investigations

Posted by David Zaring

This story about how GM is launching an internal investigation by hiring its defense lawyers to do the investigating isn't that new, but it does remind one that if you go through the revolving door, in addition to raising your salary, you're changing your practice from one involving courtrooms and complaints to one involving conference rooms and the occasional negotiation with a regulator.

In my view, one of the biggest changes in law firm practice over the past 25 years has been the growth of this sort of work at the largest of firms, which used to stay the heck away from criminal practice. That in turn has been facilitated by the emergence of the internal investigation as something that regulators expect to see done, which means that the new work is actually profitable (those investigations involve a lot of billing, defending a criminal case generally does not). And that in turn has made the revolving door revolve more quickly; it used to involve high-ranking political appointees only, now almost any long-serving, mid-level-at-least lawyer in an enforcement agency can prove useful for a law firm.

March 03, 2014

The Director As Whistleblower

Posted by David Zaring

With a hat tip to Corp Counsel, this story about Milton Webster, board member of the Chinese firm AgFeed, who blew the whistle on his company, is really unique. He was a member of the audit committee! He thought that a name brand law firm was more conflicted than solution-oriented! He resigned, and then went to the authorities (or, at least, the paintiffs)! I don't think I've ever heard of a member of the firm's audit committee dropping a dime on the firm he directs. You'll want to read this probe by Francine McKenna, but here's the Bloomberg long read as well.

February 07, 2014

Martoma Outsource

Posted by David Zaring

I'm guessing many of the readers of this blog also have been known to frequent Above The Law and the New York Times, but where can you go to see the two fonts of wisdom combined?

Right here, that's where! Two questions posed by the Martoma case are: why on earth didn't he give up Steve Cohen instead of going to jail? And why does the federal government spend so much time on insider trading? James Stewart posits that the Feds probably thought he wouldn't survive cross-ex.

[t]he government revealed that Mr. Martoma had altered his transcript to improve his grades, and had used the fabrication to seek prestigious judicial clerkships. He was subsequently expelled from Harvard Law.

That alone wouldn’t have shattered Mr. Martoma’s value to prosecutors. Few cooperating witnesses are Eagle Scouts, especially when they have been participating in what amounts to a criminal conspiracy. However brazen, the Harvard episode might have been portrayed as a serious but youthful transgression by someone overeager to get ahead. Just because someone has done something bad in the past doesn’t mean they’re not telling the truth now.

But how Mr. Martoma handled the Harvard affair, detailed in the confidential report by the law school’s administrative board after what appeared to have been lengthy proceedings, may well have proved devastating to his credibility, and thus to his ability to cut a favorable deal.

And as for the second question, check out David Lat's Martoma by the numbers. You can convict people based on making market bets that went south during the financial crisis - but you can't lose if you go after insider trading. Here's David:

Here are some notable numbers relating to the Mathew Martoma mess:

The profits made and losses avoided by SAC Capital as a result of Martoma’s insider trading: $275 million.
The win/loss record of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and the S.D.N.Y. in insider-trading cases: 79-0.
How long the Mathew Martoma trial lasted: 4+ weeks.
How long the jury deliberated: 15 hours.
Gender breakdown of the jury: 7 women, 5 men.
Counts of conviction: 2 counts of securities fraud, 1 count of conspiracy.
Penalties paid by SAC Capital back in November 2013: $1.2 billion.
Current or former employees of SAC Capital (including Martoma) who have been convicted of criminal insider-trading charges (whether by guilty plea or trial): 8.
Number of “A” grades on Mathew Martoma’s fake Harvard Law School transcript: 4 (out of 7 grades).
Number of D.C. Circuit judges that Martoma got clerkship interviews with: 3.
Age of Mathew Martoma: 39.
How many young children Martoma has: 3.
The length of Martoma’s likely prison sentence (pursuant to the non-binding federal sentencing guidelines): 7-10 years.