In a September 15, 2022 speech, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced new Department of Justice guidelines for prosecutors to use when assessing corporate criminality. Although the new guidelines address several issues, the primary focus of the guidelines is on individual accountability. Monaco emphasized at the outset of her speech that “the Department’s number one priority is individual accountability.” The new guidelines represent a clear signal of the Department’s renewed focus on corporate criminality enforcement. The text of Monaco’s speech can be found here, and the September 15, 2022 DOJ memo outlining the new guidelines can be found here.
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Cooperation Credit
Guest Post: Governance Implications of New DOJ Focus on Corporate Crime and Individual Accountability

In an October 28, 2021 speech, Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco announced important changes to the U.S. Department of Justice’s corporate criminal enforcement policies. Among other things, Monaco laid out changes to the agencies’ corporate cooperation expectations and an increased emphasis on individual accountability. In the following guest post, Michael W. Peregrine, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery LLP, takes a look the corporate governance implications of the new policies announced in Monaco’s speech. I would like to thank Michael for allowing me to publish his article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this blog’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Michael’s article.
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Department of Justice Eases “Yates Memo” Requirements for Cooperation Credit
One of the important questions about U.S. Department of Justice’s approach following the change of Presidential Administration two years ago was whether DOJ would continue emphasizing its policy of individual accountability in the agency’s 2015 statement known as the Yates Memo. In a recent speech, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein announced changes to the policy. The changes, which are more in the form of an adjustment rather than a wholesale change, makes it clear that companies seeking cooperation credit no longer need to identify “all” individuals involved in the wrongdoing, so long as the companies identify those who were “substantially involved” in the misconduct. The text of Rosenstein’s November 29, 2018 speech to the American Conference Institute’s International Conference on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, at which he announced the changes, can be found here.
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Will the Yates Memo’s Emphasis on Individual Prosecution Have A Counterproductive Impact?
In a September 9, 2015 memo from Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, the U.S. Department of Justice described a new policy focused on individual accountability for corporate wrongdoing. The keystone of the policy embodied in the Yates memo is that for companies to receive any cooperation credit, they must completely disclosure “all relevant facts about individual misconduct.” According to an interesting May 26, 2016 memo from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform entitled “DOJ’s New Threshold for Cooperation” (here), the agency’s new threshold for cooperation credit is “likely to have a number of unintended consequences.” Among other things, the report notes, the new policy risks alienating personnel whose cooperation is essential to the investigation, and indeed may motivate individuals to seek individual counsel. These and other potential unintended consequences may mean that the agency’s new policy may have a counterproductive impact on corporate cooperation.
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