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One of the signature features of the Dodd-Frank Act was its creation of the SEC whistleblower program, which includes the possibility for whistleblowers to receive generous bounties. The program has grown substantially since its inception. However, there are signs that the program may be undergoing a significant change in direction, as the SEC is “denying a record percentage of whistleblower claims,” according to a July 22, 2025, Bloomberg article, here. According to the article, the recent number of denials suggests that “the agency is enforcing rules and scrutinizing claims more strictly than in past years.”Continue Reading SEC Rejects Record Percentage of Whistleblower Award Claims

Sarah Abrams

There is no doubt that under the current Trump administration, cryptocurrency is enjoying a more hospitable environment. The environment not only affords crypto firms increased business opportunities, such as, for example, with respect to exchange-traded digital assets, but the environment may lend itself to opportunities for D&O insurers as well. In the following guest post, Sarah Abrams, Head of Claims Baleen Specialty, a division of Bowhead Specialty, reviews some of the details about the current crypto environment, as well as the opportunities and risks that the environment may represent for D&O insurers. I would like to thank Sarah for allowing me to publish her article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this site’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Sarah’s article.Continue Reading Guest Post:  Crypto-Verse D&O Opportunity

Among the many executive orders launched at the outset of the current Trump administration was the January 23, 2025 Executive Order that declared the administration’s commitment to maintaining the U.S. at the “forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) innovation.” The Executive Order set out the administration’s commitment to removing policies and directives that “act as barriers to American AI innovation.”

The Executive Order meant a variety of things when it referred to removing barriers, and the statement does at least raise the question about what the administration’s – and in particular, the SEC’s – enforcement approach to AI will be, if the goal is to remove barriers. As discussed below, there are signs to suggest that the administration will continue to monitor and address AI-related misrepresentations, notwithstanding its commitment to removing barriers to AI innovation.  Continue Reading What About AI-Related Enforcement Under the Trump Administration?

Sarah Abrams

We are now well into the new Trump administration. The President’s nominee to head the SEC, Paul Atkins, has now been sworn in. At the same time, the SEC is also dealing with the fallout from the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last term in the Jarkesy case. In the following guest post, Sarah Abrams takes a look at what all this could mean for the SEC. Sarah is Head of Claims, Baleen Specialty, a division of Bowhead Specialty. I would like to thank Sarah for allowing me to publish her article on my site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this site’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Sarah’s article. Continue Reading The Post-Jarkesy, Atkins SEC

On April 21, 2025, Paul Atkins, President Trump’s nominee, was officially sworn in as the 34th Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Atkins, who previously served as an SEC Commissioner from 2002 to 2008 during the George W. Bush administration, brings extensive prior SEC experience to his new post. In many ways that are already in evidence at the SEC in the early days of the Trump administration, the new leadership is likely to result in many significant changes in direction at the agency.Continue Reading Paul Atkins Chair Sworn In as SEC Chair

In parallel actions last week, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the SEC charged a tech exec with securities fraud in connection with fundraising for his company based on misrepresentations about the company’s AI capabilities. The exec, Albert Saniger, allegedly raised over $42 million by misrepresenting to investors that his company’s app used AI technology to complete online shopping purchases, when in fact the purchases were completed manually by contract workers located in the Philippines and elsewhere. As discussed below, there are several interesting features to these AI-related allegations.Continue Reading Tech Exec Charged with AI Washing-Related Securities Fraud

In prior posts (most recently here), I have noted the ways the new Trump administration’s policies and actions could affect the D&O liability and insurance arena. In the current rapid-fire environment, with daily developments that threaten to overturn established practices and norms, just trying to keep up – much less understand the significance of events – can be a challenge. In an effort to try to keep the scoreboard up to date, I have noted below some of the most recent key developments and tried to describe their significance for the D&O environment.Continue Reading Trump 2.0: The Latest D&O Update

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

It was no secret that the crypto enforcement approach was going to change under the Trump administration. Indeed, one of Trump’s first acts upon returning to the White House in January was to sign an executive order calculated to try to make the U.S. the “crypto capital of the world.” The SEC has likewise made it clear that under the new administration the agency will also be taking a new approach to crypto. The acting SEC leadership has already made a number of crypto-friendly moves – among other things,  the new leadership disbanded the agency’s Crypto Enforcement Task Force. The SEC has also dismissed pending cases against Binance (here) and Coinbase (here). As discussed below, the agency recently has taken even further crypto friendly actions – all of which has at least one observer to ask whether the SEC crypto pull back has gone too far?Continue Reading Sounding the Alarm on the SEC’s New Crypto Approach

Last month, when I assembled my list of the Top D&O Stories of 2024, I not only designated the November 2024 election of Donald Trump to a second Presidential term as last year’s top story but I also suggested that the advent of his second administration would likely be the top story of 2025 as well. We are now just four weeks into the Trump’s second term, and it is clear that my prognostication about the impact of the new Trump administration is truer than I ever imagined and in ways that I never foresaw.

The purpose of this post is to try to compile in one place a list of the ways in which – at least so far and at least as far as we know – the early actions of the new Trump administration has already impacted or will impact the world of D&O liability and insurance. Continue Reading Trump 2.0 and D&O (So Far)