Welcome back to the podcast, Bride, Swindler Steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge. For today's podcast, we're

listening in on Trace's Year in Review webinar with Kate Atkinson. Kate is a member and the chair

of Miller and Chevalier based in their DC office.

Here's Kate.

I think there's an interesting mix of policy, legislative, and enforcement activity to talk about in 2024

and obviously some crystal ball work that we can do at this stage of the brand new Trump administration.

We'll march through these in terms of just a overview of what happened in 2024 from an enforcement

perspective, legislative and policy updates in what has been a quite active policy administration

under President Biden, and then switch to what's next, sort of anticipated

enforcement in 2025, sort of early tea leaf reading from the Trump administration. And then just a

quick wrap up that I hope you all can use as you go back out to your constituents in your various companies and organizations.

Initiation of enforcement actions in 2024. So these are public. Never tells the whole story because

some actions are filed under seal. Always good to keep that in mind. There are tend to be cases

in the pipeline that we are not aware of just based on what's publicly disclosed.

So in 2024, there were 26 total cases initiated, 17 by DOJ, 9 by the SEC, ever so slight an increase over 2023, during which time I think particularly DOJ came under some

criticism for just kind of a slow pace. They were quite explicit in their public statements that

they were seeking to be more active in 2024, but also sort of noting the complexity of the cases that they are bringing.

This total of 26 is still well below a 10-year average of 36, so I think still not at a level

of enforcement activity that you saw in prior years. I think what's interesting is DOJ under the

Biden administration in the fraud section

in particular were very focused and routinely commented on their desire to bring what they

called impactful cases. And we'll see some of the impacts that they had in mind as we go through

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