In this Great Women in Compliance episode, Hemma hosts Jennifer Lee, a partner at Jenner & Block and former Assistant Regional Director at the SEC. The discussion covers Jennifer’s work in SEC investigations, the importance of integrity in legal practice, and key challenges faced by compliance professionals, including evolving cybersecurity obligations and the future of FCPA enforcement.
Tune in today to hear Jennifer share her insights on maintaining ethical standards, managing client expectations during investigations, and the value of community and mentorship in the legal profession.
Highlights include:
- How to avoid the slippery slope to enforcement
- Insights on values-based decision-making from Jennifer’s reading list
- What our clients need most from legal and compliance counsel
- Perspectives from a former federal prosecutor at the SEC
- What compliance officers should be thinking about today
Biography:
A former Assistant Director in the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Division of Enforcement, Jen represents public and pre-IPO companies, corporate officers, financial institutions, and asset management firms in high-stakes regulatory, internal, and litigation investigations.
During her distinguished 12-year tenure at the SEC, Jen worked on and supervised attorneys and accountants involved in a broad range of complex investigations and enforcement actions reflecting the priorities of the SEC’s enforcement program, including financial reporting and disclosures, cybersecurity issues, ESG-related issues, insider trading, investment adviser and broker-dealer regulation, auditor misconduct, and offering frauds. Jen oversaw some of the SEC’s most impactful cases, including the SEC’s first-of-its-kind cybersecurity disclosure enforcement action involving a company’s failure to disclose a massive data breach, several litigated multimillion-dollar insider trading ring actions, and a complex accounting fraud settlement involving significant clawbacks of executive compensation under Section 304 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.
Highly regarded for her knowledge of the SEC’s enforcement program and federal securities laws, Jen’s articles regularly appear in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, and she has been quoted numerous times in the Washington Post, CNBC, and Law360, particularly on the topics of financial reporting and cybersecurity. Jen has appeared as a speaker at the cybersecurity conference BlackHat and as a panelist at Securities Enforcement Forum West, Securities Forum Central, and the Bar Association of San Francisco. Jen is a member of the steering committee of Women in Securities (WISe), the steering committee for the Cambridge Forum regarding SEC enforcement, and the advisory committee for Securities Docket.
Jen earned her AB from Stanford University and her JD from Columbia Law School. She clerked for the Honorable Richard J. Holwell in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and the Honorable Roger L. Gregory in the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Before joining the SEC, Jen was a securities and commercial litigator with experience in securities fraud class actions, commercial actions, and product liability litigation.
Listen now on your favorite platforms, the Compliance Podcast Network and Corporate Compliance Insights
♥️ Thanks as always to our wonderful #GWIC community for your support. Have an idea or suggestion? Drop a note to Lisa Fine or Hemma Lomax.
