Welcome back to the podcast, Brib, Swindle, or Steel.

I'm Alexandra Rogge, and for today's podcast, we're listening in on Jeff Clark's presentation

at the recent Trace Forum in London.

Jeff is a partner in Kedwallader's Washington, D.C. office, and he's discussing the U.S. DOJ's

revised evaluation of corporate compliance programs, and, in particular, reviewing your

communications and compensation policies. Here's Jeff. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about

the most recent guidance that we've gotten from the U.S. Department of Justice on compliance,

and that comes through their evaluation of corporate compliance programs guidance. And in particular,

there's two areas where they have really kind of forged some new ground. One is about the use

of compensation or the use of compliance in compensation systems. The other is

ephemeral communications, off-channel communications. Here's a spoiler alert. I don't have any

solutions for you today. These are both really difficult areas. So if you're reaching for your

aspirin right now because it gives you a headache to talk about them,

then you're probably in the same place that a lot of other companies are. But we'll talk about what the

governments, maybe the evolution of thinking on both of these topics and then where they are today.

A little bit of history about the evaluation of corporate compliance programs. I'm going to call it the

ECCP. That's slightly easier to say. Neither is all that easy to say. But the ECCP was originally intended

as purely internal guidance. DOJ guidance to its prosecutors who were called upon to evaluate the

corporate compliance programs of companies that were before

them in enforcement actions. And it still serves that purpose. But when it first came out in 2017,

it just sort of appeared magically on the internet one day, no press release, no nothing. And if you

knew where to look, you could find it, but you wouldn't find it by trolling

...