Paul Atkins, President Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as SEC Chair, has not even yet assumed his new office – his nomination apparently is scheduled to go before the relevant Senate committee on March 27 – but big changes are already underway at the agency under Mark Uyeda, the agency’s acting Chair. Indeed, based on the changes so far, a group of five leading academics including Columbia Law Professor John Coffee Jr. and calling themselves the “Shadow SEC” has already raised the alarm, warning in a March 13, 2025 post on the CLS Blue Sky Blog that as a result of current and proposed staffing and budget cuts, the agency is well on the way to becoming a “shell of its former self,” as it “becomes an agency with little power, capacity, or independent judgment.”Continue Reading Big Changes are Already Underway at the SEC
The standard view of the Biden Administration SEC under the leadership of Gary Gensler is that the agency will take a more active enforcement approach than was the case during the prior administration. Two developments in the past few days certainly support this standard view. First, in a speech last week, new SEC Enforcement Division Director 
In the largest such award so far this year, the SEC has awarded more than $27 million to a whistleblower, an award amount that the Commission increased above staff recommendations in recognition that the whistleblower had “repeatedly and tenaciously” voiced his concerns about the misconduct within his organization before reporting it to the agency. As discussed below, there are a number of noteworthy features about this award. The Commission’s April 16, 2020 order about the award can be found 
A recurring question – one that I am getting now on just about a daily basis – arises from concerns about the Trump administration’s possible impact on the world of directors’ and officers’ liability. Implicit in the question is the assumption that the new administration’s policies and actions will indeed affect D&O claims. While I agree with this assumption – that the new administration’s actions will have an impact–at this point it is still far too early to tell what that impact might be. For now, I think all we can do is watch some key indicators. In this blog post, I review what I think are the key indicators, and what the indicators may tell us about what lies ahead for D&O claims.
With the arrival of the new Chair of the SEC, Mary Jo White, the agency has undertaken a variety of new enforcement initiatives. Among the most interesting is the agency use of data anallytics to try to uncover public company accouunting abuses. The following guest post from 
Numerous questions surround the SEC’s new policy requiring enforcement action defendants in “egregious” cases to admit to wrongdoing in order to settle with the agency, rather than simply agreeing to neither admit nor deny the agency’s allegations. As I discussed in a prior post (