This article is intended to provide a practical overview of what practitioners should expect, and what issues they should be anticipating and addressing when representing a client during a regulatory investigation before the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), one of the self-regulatory organizations (SROs), or a state securities regulator.
What to do First
Issues to Address at the Outset of an Inquiry
It may be intuitive, but it bears emphasizing that the client needs to take all regulatory inquiries seriously from the outset. This holds true regardless of which regulator is involved or the stage of inquiry to which one is responding. Every regulator has the ability to disrupt a client's business and negatively impact a client's reputation or, in the extreme, issue fines and penalties, suspend or terminate a client's securities licenses and make a criminal referral.
To continue reading, download the PDF.
This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of the New Jersey Lawyer, a publication of the New Jersey State Bar Association, and is reprinted here with permission.