Fintech

  • September 24, 2024

    Star Witness Against Bankman-Fried Gets 2 Years In FTX Case

    A Manhattan federal judge sentenced former cryptocurrency executive Caroline Ellison to two years in prison Tuesday, crediting her decision to testify against FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried but saying the $11.2 billion fraud was too big to warrant a "get out of jail free card."

  • September 24, 2024

    Baker Donelson Adds Financial Services Expert In DC

    Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz PC has hired a new shareholder who started her 15-year legal career as an attorney adviser in the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Banking and Finance Division, the firm announced Tuesday.

  • September 24, 2024

    DOJ Accuses Visa Of Monopolizing Debit Card Market

    The U.S. Department of Justice accused Visa on Tuesday of illegally maintaining a monopoly over debit card networks by using its dominance to thwart competition from new and existing rivals, as the Biden administration continues its push to combat high prices using antitrust law.

  • September 24, 2024

    SEC, CFTC Issue $118M Fines In Latest Text Message Actions

    Federal regulators said Tuesday that the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and nearly a dozen other financial firms have agreed to pay fines totaling nearly $120 million to settle recordkeeping violations tied to employee use of unapproved communication methods like text messages to conduct business.

  • September 23, 2024

    3rd Circ. Probes SEC's 'Close To Vacuous' Reply To Coinbase

    Members of a Third Circuit panel on Monday pressed the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on its brief denial of crypto exchange Coinbase's request for rulemaking around digital assets, digging into how much of an explanation the agency owes the industry about its decision to forego setting rules for now.

  • September 23, 2024

    Crypto Miners Must Keep Fighting SEC's $18M Fraud Claims

    A Utah federal judge on Monday refused to throw out the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's suit accusing two Utah residents of running an $18 million crypto fraud scheme, rejecting their arguments that the transactions at the heart of the dispute do not involve securities subject to the SEC's regulation.

  • September 23, 2024

    Coinbase Brings On Ex-Citadel Legal Chief With SEC Chops

    Coinbase announced on Monday it has hired Ryan VanGrack to serve as its vice president of legal, where he will be overseeing civil litigation, regulatory probes, employment and intellectual property matters for the crypto exchange after spending seven years with Citadel Securities as general counsel.

  • September 23, 2024

    CFTC Fines Piper Sandler $2M In Latest Text Messaging Action

    The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission both announced settlements Monday in their ongoing probe into the financial industry's use of personal devices to discuss company business, with the CFTC issuing a fine against a subsidiary of Piper Sandler & Co. while the SEC said that a cooperative investment adviser would not have to pay anything. 

  • September 23, 2024

    DOJ Adds AI Risk To Corporate Compliance Program

    The U.S. Department of Justice's Criminal Division is now weighing how companies manage risk related to artificial intelligence and potentially stymie whistleblowers, one of several updates to the division's policies on evaluating corporate compliance programs announced by a senior official on Monday.

  • September 23, 2024

    SEC Scores $12M Judgment In Unregistered Dealer Case

    A Minnesota federal judge has ordered financial firm Carebourn Capital LP, its founder and an affiliated company to pay more than $12 million in disgorgement and prejudgment interest over U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claims they made millions selling securities as unregistered dealers.

  • September 23, 2024

    PNC, Plaid End Legal Battle With Customer Data-Sharing Deal

    PNC Financial Services Group and Plaid have reached an agreement to end nearly four years of trademark litigation that allows PNC customers to use Plaid to share their financial data with fintech companies like Venmo and Cash App.

  • September 23, 2024

    Davis Polk Vows Ex-Clerk Won't Touch Crypto Merger Suit

    Local counsel for Galaxy Digital Holdings Inc. has told a Delaware vice chancellor that Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP will ensure that an incoming associate who clerked for the state's Supreme Court won't share information with attorneys defending the digital assets company in a merger suit that the state's highest court revived in May.

  • September 23, 2024

    Shkreli Told To Provide More Info On Wu-Tang Album Copies

    A Brooklyn federal judge on Monday ordered Martin Shkreli to update the court on how many tracks he copied from a one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album after the cryptocurrency group that now owns the work argued Shkreli could be holding out on surrendering all his copies amid the parties' legal battle.

  • September 23, 2024

    Holland & Knight Adds Former Treasury Adviser In DC

    A former adviser for the U.S. Department of the Treasury and counsel for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has moved his practice to Holland & Knight's office in Washington, D.C., the firm announced Monday.

  • September 23, 2024

    Autism Played Role In Bankman-Fried Case, 2nd Circ. Told

    A group of experts on neurodiversity told the Second Circuit that Sam Bankman-Fried, who has said he has autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, may have been hurt at trial by a "cognitive and communication style" that at times frustrated the trial judge.

  • September 20, 2024

    3rd Circ. CFPB Ruling Threatens Securitization, Justices Told

    Two major trade groups for the securities industry have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to review a Third Circuit decision allowing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to exercise enforcement authority over a collection of student loan securitization trusts, slamming the ruling as wrong and dangerous.

  • September 20, 2024

    Judge Won't Toss Fraud Suit Against Crypto-Forex Co. Execs

    A Florida judge decided that the CEO and a founding shareholder of purported foreign exchange currency broker FxWinning Ltd. have sufficient ties to Florida to keep them among the defendants of a suit alleging the business and its operators perpetrated a multimillion-dollar fraud.

  • September 20, 2024

    CFPB Pitches Remittance Rule Tweak For Consumer Inquiries

    The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau moved Friday to revise a longstanding remittance disclosure requirement, saying the agency thinks the wording may be causing it to get inundated with thousands of phone calls from consumers asking about their international money transfers.

  • September 20, 2024

    States Tell 10th Circ. To Back Colo. Interest Rate Opt-Out Law

    Attorneys general for 13 states and Washington, D.C., asked the Tenth Circuit on Friday to uphold a Colorado law imposing more restrictive interest rate caps on loans made to its residents by out-of-state banks, arguing that a federal judge's injunction "nullifies the authority granted to states by Congress" to protect consumers from abusive lending practices.

  • September 20, 2024

    NFT Buyers Bring Securities Suit Against Crypto Co. OpenSea

    Two Florida users of OpenSea hit the nonfungible token marketplace with a proposed securities class action claiming the assets the users bought on the platform are unregistered investment contracts in light of recent court decisions and regulatory scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

  • September 20, 2024

    2 SEC Commissioners Object To Whistleblower Award Secrecy

    U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioners Mark Uyeda and Hester Peirce have objected to the agency's recent decision to hand out a total of $122 million in two awards to four whistleblowers and issued a statement taking issue with the regulator's policy of saying little to nothing about why the rewards are issued.

  • September 20, 2024

    Silvergate Wants Activist Investor's Board Seat Play Blocked

    The parent company of Silvergate Bank, a defunct bank that catered to the cryptocurrency industry, has asked the judge in its Delaware bankruptcy case to help head off what it described as an activist investor's effort to score a seat on the debtor's board so he can try to secure a payout for shareholders who are set to receive nothing under a Chapter 11 plan.

  • September 20, 2024

    Chevron's Demise May Not Bring Deluge Courts Had Feared

    Though the death of Chevron deference has opened a door to attacking administrative decisions, the expected uptick in litigation probably won't threaten to clog federal courts, numerous administrative law experts told Law360.

  • September 19, 2024

    Dems Seek School Lunch 'Junk Fee' Ban After CFPB Report

    A group of Democratic senators has called on the Biden administration to crack down on payment processing fees in school lunch programs, citing a recent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau report that raised concerns about the charges parents pay to fund their kids' online lunch money accounts.

  • September 19, 2024

    CFTC Warns Of 'Profound' Harm In Election Betting Appeal

    The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission fought Thursday to prevent an online trading platform from offering betting on election outcomes while the agency appeals a trial court ruling that allowed the futures contracts to go live, warning the D.C. Circuit that the "high-stakes" event contracts threaten serious harm to election integrity.

Expert Analysis

  • FBI Raid Signals Growing Criminal Enforcement Of Algorithms

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    The U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division's increased willingness to pursue the use of algorithmic pricing as a potential criminal violation means that companies need to understand the software solutions they employ and stay abreast of antitrust best practices when contracting with providers, say attorneys at Rule Garza.

  • Best Text Practices In Light Of Terraform's $4.5B Fraud Deal

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    Text messages were extremely important in a recent civil trial against Terraform Labs, leading to a $4.5 billion settlement, so litigants in securities fraud cases need to have robust mobile data policies that address the content and retention of messages, and the obligations of employees to allow for collection, say Josh Sohn and Alicia Clausen at Crowell & Moring.

  • Series

    Solving Puzzles Makes Me A Better Lawyer

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    Tackling daily puzzles — like Wordle, KenKen and Connections — has bolstered my intellectual property litigation practice by helping me to exercise different mental skills, acknowledge minor but important details, and build and reinforce good habits, says Roy Wepner at Kaplan Breyer.

  • CFPB's New Registration Rule Will Intensify Nonbank Scrutiny

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    The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's recently finalized nonbank registration rule aimed at cracking down on repeat offenders poses significant compliance challenges and enforcement risks for nonbank financial firms, and may be particularly onerous for smaller firms, say Ketan Bhirud and Emily Yu at Cozen O'Connor.

  • Dapper Settlement Offers Rules Of The Road For NFT Issuers

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    The terms of a $4 million settlement in a class action alleging that Dapper Labs sold its NBA Top Shot Moments as unregistered securities may be a model for third parties that wish to avoid securities liability in connection with offering digital asset non-fungible token collectibles, say attorneys at K&L Gates.

  • Texas Ethics Opinion Flags Hazards Of Unauthorized Practice

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    The Texas Professional Ethics Committee's recently issued proposed opinion finding that in-house counsel providing legal services to the company's clients constitutes the unauthorized practice of law is a valuable clarification given that a UPL violation — a misdemeanor in most states — carries high stakes, say Hilary Gerzhoy and Julienne Pasichow at HWG.

  • Navigating The New Rise Of Greenwashing Litigation

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    As greenwashing lawsuits continue to gain momentum with a shift in focus to carbon-neutrality claims, businesses must exercise caution and ensure transparency in their environmental marketing practices, taking cues from recent legal challenges in the airline industry, say attorneys at Baker McKenzie.

  • In Memoriam: The Modern Administrative State

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    On June 28, the modern administrative state, where courts deferred to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes, died when the U.S. Supreme Court overruled its previous decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council — but it is survived by many cases decided under the Chevron framework, say Joseph Schaeffer and Jessica Deyoe at Babst Calland.

  • How High Court Approached Time Limit On Reg Challenges

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    The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Corner Post v. Federal Reserve Board effectively gives new entities their own personal statute of limitations to challenge rules and regulations, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh's concurrence may portend the court's view that those entities do not need to be directly regulated, say attorneys at Snell & Wilmer.

  • Series

    Florida Banking Brief: All The Notable Legal Updates In Q2

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    The second quarter of 2024 brought two notable bills that will affect Florida's banking and finance community across many issues, including virtual currency abandonment, cancellation of financial services on the basis of political opinions, and the exemption amount of motor vehicles, say Joshua Prever and Andrew Balthazor at Holland & Knight.

  • First-Of-Its-Kind Chancery Ruling Will Aid SPAC Defendants

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    The Delaware Chancery Court's first full dismissal of claims challenging a special purpose acquisition company transaction under the entire fairness doctrine in the recent Hennessy Capital Acquisition Stockholder Litigation establishes useful precedent to abate the flood of SPAC litigation, say Lisa Bugni and Benjamin Lee at King & Spalding.

  • How To Clean Up Your Generative AI-Produced Legal Drafts

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    As law firms increasingly rely on generative artificial intelligence tools to produce legal text, attorneys should be on guard for the overuse of cohesive devices in initial drafts, and consider a few editing pointers to clean up AI’s repetitive and choppy outputs, says Ivy Grey at WordRake.

  • Supreme Court's ALJ Ruling Carries Implications Beyond SEC

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    In its recent Jarkesy opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court limited the types of cases that can be tried before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's in-house administrative law judges, setting the stage for challenges to the constitutionality of ALJs across other agencies, say Robert Robertson and Kimberley Church at Dechert.

  • Series

    Boxing Makes Me A Better Lawyer

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    Boxing has influenced my legal work by enabling me to confidently hone the skills I've learned from the sport, like the ability to remain calm under pressure, evaluate an opponent's weaknesses and recognize when to seize an important opportunity, says Kirsten Soto at Clyde & Co.

  • Series

    After Chevron: No Deference, No Difference For SEC Or CFTC

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    The Chevron doctrine did not fundamentally alter the interplay between the courts and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the development of the securities and commodities laws — and its demise will not do so either, says Dan Berkovitz at Millennium Management.

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