Here are some recent stories that I found interesting:
Canada and the Corruption of Foreign Officials Act by Tom Fox
The CFPOA was passed in back in 1999. However, up until this year, there was only one enforcement action under the legislation involving a Canadian company and no prior enforcement actions against individuals. The Canadian government, as a signatory to the OECD Treaty Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, felt an obligation to actively enforce its foreign anti-corruption and anti-bribery statute. This led to the funding for and creation of two RCMP units dedicated to enforcing the act, in 2008.
Defendant Used Blackberry PIN Messages to Avoid Feds by Ryan J. Reilly in Main Justice
According to the DOJ, Farkas and his co-conspirators made efforts to disguise their alleged fraud by communicating using a feature on their Blackberry phones that allowed them to send so-called “PIN messages,” which are similar to text messages but not routed through or saved on a computer server.
What One Mizzou Grad Learned in Law School by Kashmir Hill in Above the Law
I’m studying for the bar right now, and to be honest, little of this sounds like what I learned in law school. So I said to myself, if I didn’t pick up these 20-odd topics, what did I learn? He came up with a list of the 17 things he learned in law school.
Site offers Better Access to Federal Rulemaking in Robert Ambrogi’s LawSites
But Regulations.gov is difficult to use for experts and average citizens alike, say the founders of a new site, OpenRegs.com. They have created this site “to make the proposed and final regulations published in the Federal Register easy to find and discuss, so that citizens can become better informed and more involved.”
How Embarrassing… Westlaw Reference Attorneys Are Blogging… And You’re Not?? by Greg Lambert in 3 Geeks and a Law Blog
Westlaw’s Reference Attorneys have set up their own blog where they focus on the needs of Summer Associates and produce blog posts that point out some of the needs expressed by Summer Associates and relay that to others. The bloggers share information that comes in from Summer Associate calls in order to identify trends (such as issues on the gulf oil spill), and get someone to blog about how they’ve handled the issues so that others can benefit from the experience.
