The key to a comprehensive compliance program starts by having the right advisors at your fingertips to help you navigate ever-changing regulatory and political developments and apply them to your policies, procedures, and general compliance culture. We take a proactive approach to this task by offering specialists in specific high-risk compliance areas who are dialed-in to the changes afoot, rather than compliance generalists who merely establish protocol and best practices. This difference is important because we emphasize evaluating your existing practices and implementing change to minimize operational bottlenecks.

We take the time and care to understand any previous compliance issues, review your current program, and partner with you to recommend and implement updates that will strengthen your compliance and business for many years to come.

Upgrading policies, procedures and protocols is an important step toward developing or improving your culture of compliance, but often simply upgrading these elements does not dig deep enough to root out potential risks. Conducting in-depth audits of high-risk areas, such as sanctions and anti-bribery/compliance, allows us to identify underlying issues that require a more hands-on approach.

The benefit of our auditing solutions is that they provide us with the necessary data to inform decisions on how to best implement compliance programs, and they provide you with the data to show the ROI of compliance by measuring mitigated risks.

We believe that an effective compliance culture starts at the top of an organization. Training senior executive teams, corporate counsel teams, compliance and risk managers, heads of internal audit, and corporate governance officers on how to identify risks within their business lines and take the appropriate actions to mitigate those risks will pay for itself in the long-term.

Our approach to training focuses on interactive workshops that promote discussion. We believe discussion at the top of the organization is an important aspect of the training because not only does it engage those in attendance, but most often the discussions lead to issues inherent in your organization that may not have been addressed in a more standardized, one-direction training session.

With former investigators and prosecutors on our team we can assist companies in responding to and dealing with raids by regulators (SFO, HMRC, DOJ, SEC etc) across multi-jurisdictions:

• Our lawyers can be available day or night to advise on how to deal with a legal or regulatory crisis. 
• We can protect and defend companies and their directors in the event of an arrest, interview or prosecution by a regulator/enforcement authority. 
• We can help to strategically manage the response to regulatory enforcement action at all phases.

Precipitated either by a whistleblower report, an external auditors' finding, a dawn raid, or service notices to produce documents, internal and regulatory investigations can consume your business operations and exponentially increase your liability risk. Having an external legal advisor engaged in these situations not only adds additional resources to combat the investigation, but it can provide additional benefits to mitigate your current and future risk if the investigation is structured by an experienced attorney.

• Internal Investigations 

Depending on the facts of what initiated the need for an internal investigation, we can provide both direct and indirect support that will improve the process and outcome of the investigation. At a minimum, you should consider involving external counsel like Dechert to get sign off on the scope of the internal investigation or to oversee the investigation strategy to get legal professional privilege. Why do you want LPP around your internal investigation? Because you may want the contents of the investigation to remain confidential and give you time to decide on disclosure to the regulators. 

• Regulator Investigations

Our team is available 24/7 to advise senior officers, audit committees and boards of directors on all relevant issues, such as voluntary disclosure, disciplinary and remedial measures and local law. With a detailed knowledge of anti-corruption laws and enforcement agency practices in many countries, we regularly coordinate complex, multi-jurisdictional investigations. We have represented clients in some of the most complex and far-reaching anti-corruption cases around the world.