Attorneys and professors in law David Snyder and Sarah Dadush join the podcast to discuss the role of contracting in ESG, how a conventional approach to writing contracts may not be the best choice, which issues are fixed, and how accountability should be on both the buyer and supplier.
▶️ Contracting for ESG with David Snyder and Sarah Dadush:
Key points discussed in the episode:
✔️ Supply chains are doing enough for ESG compliance. David Snyder and Sarah Dadush aim to combat this with more effective measures.
✔️ Policies remain unimplemented if they aren’t in the contract. Having a supplier code of conduct written with the assistance of a business lawyer isn’t enough to create change.
✔️ Working at an oil refinery helped David Snyder learn the true culprit – organized crime. He wanted human and environmental efforts to be treated the same way as product manufacturing.
✔️ ESG can impact both consumer and investor decisions. The California Supply Chains Transparency Act pushed for full disclosure directed at the customers.
✔️ Focusing only on forced labor leaves out other problems.
✔️ Traditional approaches to contracting ESG don’t work, Sarah Dadush says. Not only does it aggravate human rights risks but also increases the company’s chances of legal violations.
✔️ David Snyder emphasizes the importance of risk as part of supply chain management and compliance obligations. Lawyers should also play their part in handling clients properly instead of resorting to risk shifting.
✔️ Contracts don’t fix all supply chain issues. It all boils down to supply chain resilience. A weaker foundation puts companies in greater danger, especially in times of difficulty like the COVID-19 pandemic.
✔️ Buyers should be responsible when exiting contracts. Contracts have been misused at the height of the pandemic, and consumers are now urging businesses to be accountable for their shortcomings.
David Snyder was appointed professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law in the fall of 2007 and was appointed director of the Business Law Program in 2008. During 2021-2022, he also holds a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European University Institute (Florence). He graduated summa cum laude from Tulane University Law School in 1991, and he has been a professor of law at Tulane, Indiana (Bloomington), and Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. He has been a regular visiting professor at the law school of the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) since 2012, and has also been a visiting professor at the University of Paris 10 (Nanterre La Défense), Boston University, and the College of William and Mary. In addition, he has taught summer courses at the University of Mainz (Germany). After graduating from law school, Professor Snyder served as a law clerk to the Honorable John M. Duhé Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and subsequently joined the D.C. firm of Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells). In 2014 Professor Snyder was awarded a MacCormick Fellowship during which he delivered the annual Wilson Memorial Lecture at the University of Edinburgh.
Sarah Dadush’s research lies at the intersection of business and human rights. Her scholarship explores various innovative legal mechanisms for improving the social and environmental performance of multinational corporations. She directs the Law School’s newly-established Business & Human Rights Law Program and co-leads an ABA Business Law Section Working Group that has developed a comprehensive toolkit for upgrading international supply contracts to better protect workers’ human rights.
—————————————————————————-
Do you have a podcast (or do you want to)? Join the only network dedicated to compliance, risk management, and business ethics, the Compliance Podcast Network. For more information, contact Tom Fox at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.
Author: admin
Avi Singer is the founder and CEO of Showd.me, a company that is helping organizations provide remote and on-demand compliance training solutions, specifically in the healthcare space. Tom Fox welcomes him to this week’s show to talk about how Showd.me helps its clients and compliance as a service.
The Commercialization of Compliance
Avi tells Tom that the name Showd.me came from a common experience: when you ask someone how they learned to do something they would usually reply, “Somebody showed me”. Showd.me began as a platform that was designed for companies to implement social and peer-to-peer learning. This means that it allows new employees to learn and train from more experienced employees across the organization, via an easy-to-use learning management platform. They grasped the opportunity to break into the healthcare compliance industry, where they aid in hiring, developing, retaining, and certifying the organization’s employees.
Compliance as a Service
Tom asks Avi to define compliance as a service and how the concept resonates for him in the marketplace. Compliance as a service is providing a platform where compliance training can be readily accessible for those who require it, Avi responds. “In the compliance marketplace the platform is important, the technology, the learning management platform is important, and accessibility is important, and whether people can use it is important,” Avi explains. He adds that making it in the compliance as a service industry, means tailoring the content and the training for their audience, in order to achieve the organization’s goal.
Talent Acquisition and Retention
In a response to Tom’s question, Avi explains how Showd.me helps an organization with setting up their new hires for success. He says that there are two concepts that they take into consideration during the application and hiring process. They are hiring for a while and hiring for now. When hiring for a while, you should focus on selling your organization as the ideal work environment, where future employees can see themselves thriving. Showd.me helps their clients by doing the paperwork and remote training for the prospective “hired for a while” employees. Additionally, they provide support for every step of the new journey for the new employees.
When hiring for now, clients are encouraged to ensure that the application, interview, and hiring process happens as quickly as possible by utilizing an online platform. Tom then asks how they would alter their training in the future to maintain talent acquisition and retention. Avi replies that fervent data analysis is the answer: they can identify which training techniques work and which ones have stopped working.
Looking Ahead
Tom asks Avi how technological advancements would affect the process of compliance going into 2025. Avi explains that whenever a company implements a new compliance requirement, it is in addition to the previous requirements, which may get confusing. Therefore, you must have systems with processes in place to combat the changing times as efficiently as possible.
Resources
Avi Singer | LinkedIn | Twitter
showd.me
Categories
A Listening Tour for Compliance
A recent Inc.com article caught my eye about a series of events that returning Starbucks Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Howard Schultz has been engaging in. According to author Justin Bariso, Schultz has been engaging in a “listening tour” of Starbucks stores, literally across America. According to Schultz, he told employees “We are traveling the country, trying to, with great sensitivity, understand from you, how can we do better.” What are employees telling him? Bariso wrote, “he listens intently to one Starbucks employee after another, a pained look comes over Schultz’s face. Employees lament about the lack of training, increased turnover, and extreme pressure they’ve been forced to endure as company profits soared, but worker conditions plummeted.”
This listening tour has several goals for Schultz. The first is that even though the company has sustained record profits, morale at the company is at an all-time low. Witness the unionizing efforts that have been successful. Employees are simply fed up with not being listened to. This has eroded employee trust and management and driven down the once vibrant culture at the iconic institution. In order to rebuild that trust Starbucks, in the form of their CEO, “must first listen.” But it is more than simply listening to rebuild trust, it is rebuilding employee engagement by making them and their ideas part of the solution.
Obviously, there is still much work for Starbucks and Schultz to do. Yet these initial steps can lead to real change. Schultz is doing more than saying “We Care”; he is modeling that language in his behavior. This is action at the top. It is also communicating to other senior management they need to listen to re-engage and to build back employee trust. Now what if a Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) took that same approach for compliance? My belief is that a Schulz inspired listening tour can add multiple benefits to your compliance program.
Engagement
Start off by meeting as many compliance stakeholders as possible. You can use town hall settings, or go smaller, meeting with key employee leaders, key stakeholders and employees identified as high risk who you can meet with individually or in smaller groups. Listen to their compliance concerns and take their compliance ideas back to the home office. After returning to your office, winnow down their ideas and suggestions to form the basis of enhancements to your existing compliance program.
After you roll out your enhanced compliance program with new training, you can then give specific examples of how employee input led to the changes in the enhanced program. This engages the employees and makes them feel like they were a part of, and had a vested interest in, the company’s compliance program. This employee engagement will lead to greater stakeholder buy-in.
Education
But during the town hall meetings, and the smaller more informal group meetings, you can do more than simply listen, you can also train. This training is on overall ethics and how the employees could use compliance as a business tool. Most business’s ethical standards are not found in an existing compliance program, they are found in the general anti-discrimination guidelines and ethical business practices such anti-competitiveness and use of confidential information prohibitions. Often these general concepts can be found in a company’s overall Code of Conduct or similar statement of business ethics; workplace anti-discrimination and anti-harassment guidelines can be found in Human Resource (HR) policies and procedures. Concepts such as anti-competitiveness and use of customer and competitor’s illegally obtained confidential information may be found in anti-trust or other business practice focused guidelines.
All of this gets your employees and other stakeholders to start thinking about doing business the ethical way. It is ethical concept-based training in contrast to a rules-based approach. Moreover, this lays the groundwork for the enhancement of your compliance program and the training that will occur as the enhancement is rolled out.
Risk Assessment
Now think about this same approach from the risk assessment perspective. Listen to your employees concerns and listen to the compliance issues raised. From there you can begin to ask questions about what was done and why. This approach is not adversarial or an interrogation, but it is ferreting out the employees concerns while having the employees educate your compliance team on the actual procedures that are used. By listening, and gently questioning, you should be able to garner enough information to create a risk assessment profile which can inform and even become the basis of compliance program enhancements.
Bariso concluded his article by stating, “People lose motivation when they sense you don’t care. But the simple act of listening creates goodwill. When your people feel understood, they’ll be motivated to contribute and can help you discover insights you wouldn’t otherwise. So, when it comes to solving your company’s biggest problems, don’t ignore your most helpful resource: your people.” It all starts with listening. Let your employees and other stakeholders have the “chance to share their problems, as well as to propose solutions. Meetings like these will reveal key insights, and they will transform your people from employees to partners.”
In this episode of the Compliance Week 2022 Preview Podcasts series, Holly will discuss some of her presentation at Compliance Week 2022 “Effectively Managing Risk in a “Move Fast and Break Things” World”. Some of the issues she will discuss in this podcast and her presentation are:
- The dichotomy between compliance and the rest of the business unit – ie. the perception that while the rest of the business speeds up and adapts an agile framework for competitive advantage, risk and compliance are seen as slowing things down
- Strategies to bridge this divide with always-on risk management approaches
- Learn how CCOs can empower the business to adopt iterative, cyclical planning that simultaneously achieves business speed and strategic risk management
In this first full compliance conference in over 2 years, I hope you can join me at Compliance Week 2022. This year’s event will be May 16-18 at the JW Marriott in Washington DC. The line-up of this year’s event is simply first rate with some of the top ethics and compliance practitioners around.
Gain insights and make connections at the industry’s premier cross-industry national compliance event offering knowledge-packed, accredited sessions and take-home advice from the most influential leaders in the compliance community. Back for its 17th year, compliance, ethics, legal, and audit professionals will gather safely face-to-face to benchmark best practices and gain the latest tactics and strategies to enhance their compliance programs. and many others to:
- Network with your peers, including C-suite executives, legal professionals, HR leaders and ethics and compliance visionaries.
- Hear from 75+ respected cross-industry practitioners who are CEOs, CCOs, regulators, federal officials, and practitioners to help inform and shape the strategic direction of your enterprise risk management program.
- Hear directly from the two SEC Commissioners and gain insights into the agency’s areas of enforcement and walk away with guidance on how to remain compliant within emerging areas such as ESG disclosure, third-party risk management, cybersecurity, cryptocurrency and more.
- Bring actionable takeaways back to your program from various session types including ESG, Human Trafficking, Board obligations and many others for you to listen, learn and share.
- The goal of Compliance Week is to arm you with information, strategy and tactics to transform your organization and your career by connecting ethics to business performance through process augmentation and data visualization.
I hope you can join me at the event. For information on the event, click here. As an extra benefit to listeners of this podcast, Compliance Week is offering a $200 discount off the registration price. Enter discount code discount code TFLAW $200 OFF.
In this episode of Career Can Do, Mary Ann Faremouth chats with Elizabeth Ruiz, a prolific leadership and communication consultant with four decades of experience in coaching, training, and development. Elizabeth is a board member of several organizations, including the Columbia University Alumni Association. She is also an author and speaker at EAR Enterprises, and a member of the leadership team at District56 Toastmasters – which catapulted her into the lifelong journey of mastering the art of listening. Elizabeth discusses how Toastmasters has impacted her life, and how it continues to impact the lives of others in positive and powerful ways.
Toastmasters’ conferences are wonderful opportunities to build connections while learning and having fun, even presenting attendees with the chance to win prizes. They not only help you hone and polish your public speaking skills, but also enhance your listening skills, and your ability to conduct meetings and present yourself both virtually and in person. The networking is the icing on the cake – whoever you meet there will undoubtedly enrich your personal and professional lives. The conferences also provide a neutral ground for employers and job-seekers to mingle with each other.
The organization’s Pathways program is a gold mine for personal and professional development, equipped with up to 11 interesting paths – from coaching to leadership, to digital public speaking – with five levels in each. You can spend anywhere from 6 months to 2 years on completing a Pathway, and you go at your own pace.
Resources
Faremouth.com
ToastmastersHouston.com
Welcome to the Hughes Hubbard Anti-Corruption and Internal Investigations Practice Group’s Podcast, All Things Investigations. In this podcast, host Tom Fox and members of the Hughes Hubbard Anti-Corruption & Internal Investigations Practice Group will highlight some of the key legal issues involved in white-collar and other investigations, both domestically and internationally. In this episode, I visit with Mike DeBernardis, a partner at Hughes Hubbard, about some of the key developments in ethics compliance and FCPA from Q1 2022.
Michael A. DeBernardis is a partner in the firm’s Washington office and a member of the firm’s Anti-Corruption and Internal Investigations and White Collar & Regulatory Defense practice groups. Michael assists clients with internal investigations relating to high-stakes matters including bribery and corruption under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, procurement fraud, financial and accounting fraud, money laundering, and other ethics issues and violations of company policy. Michael has represented clients in connection with inquiries by the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, among others.
Key areas we discuss on this podcast are:
- Q1 brought resolutions that were excellent examples for training and increasing understanding about compliance issues.
- One of the more difficult aspects of compliance is scoping investigations.
- View input from your monitor as an opportunity to truly improve your processes, procedures and controls. Having a positive relationship with them is hugely valuable.
- Developing an investigation plan and protocols is an iterative process.
- Changes to the SEC Whistleblower program.
- Anti-corruption implications of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Resources
Hughes Hubbard & Reed website
Mike DeBernardis
Coburn and the Attorney/Client Privilege
Tom Fox is back for a new episode of The ESG Report. He’s joined by Professor Karen Woody, and they go inside the SEC to take a look at the process and procedure, as well as the arguments made against the recently proposed rule around ESG.
The Proposal Process
“These rules aren’t just picked from the sky,” Karen explains. There are a number of people at the SEC who come together to devise these rules, with a lot of time being spent working through the proposal process. After the rule is written, the public has 60 days to comment on it, and once this period ends, the SEC takes these comments under advisement to promulgate a final rule.
Challenging the Dissent
Karen points out that in the past, there has always been dissent whenever a rule was proposed in the SEC. However, the recent presence of dissent at almost every turn in the commission has created what feels like a very political space that – according to Karen – isn’t doing anyone any favors.
A major argument that was raised is that promoting rules about climate does not lie within the SEC’s scope of authority. Karen disagrees; she states, “It would be hard to find an industry that won’t be touched by a climate event,” citing the many corporate sectors that would be negatively affected should a climate emergency occur.
Another big point of issue was that investors don’t care about ESG. To rebut this, Karen brings up the Conflict Minerals Regulation, and how it is the perfect counterpoint to ESG. ESG is an investor-led movement, because people do want to know how green companies are.
Challenging a Final Rule
The procedure of challenging an SEC rule once it becomes final differs depending on where the challenge comes from. “The SEC is its own mini country,” says Karen, because they write and enforce their own rules, and the commission has its own court with an appointed administrative law judge. She explains the legal process that is involved with filing a lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission should one wish to challenge a final rule, which involves answering to their administrative law judge, and eventually to an Article III court.
RESOURCES
Tom Fox’s email
Karen Woody | LinkedIn | Twitter
In this episode of the FCPA Compliance Report I visit with Mike Volkov. Mike recently did a three-part blog post series reviewing the DOJ trial strategy, successes and failures and approach of the antitrust division. In this podcast we take a deep dive into FCPA trials, other white collar fraud trials and antitrust trials the DOJ has had over the past few years. We assess the key approaches, discuss some important wins and unfortunate stumbles.
Resources
Mike Volkov on Corruption Crime & Compliance
Part 1 – A Mixed Bag
Part 2 – Big Victories and Misguided Targets
Part 3 – Antitrust Division Stumbles
In today’s edition of Daily Compliance News:
· Howard Schultz goes on a listening tour. (Inc.)
· Will SEC (and DOJ) gags in agreed Orders end? (NYT)
· Russian threat to the global energy industry. (WaPo)
· Waging war on Putin’s corruption. (Seattle Times)