(0.5 General California MCLE)  The Dodd-Frank Act was enacted as a response to the Great Recession of 2007, but what does this complex regulation do and has it fixed the problems or addressed the causes of the financial meltdown? Former SEC Commissioner Annette Nazareth explains...

Annette Nazareth is a partner at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell and served as a key financial services policy maker at the SEC for over a decade.  At the SEC, Nazareth has held a number of positions.   Joining the SEC staff in 1998, Nazareth served as a Senior Counsel to Chairman Arthur Levitt and then served as Interim Director of Investment Management.  She was appointed as Director of Market Regulation (now the Division of Trading and Markets) from 1999 to 2005. In 2005, Nazareth became an SEC Commissioner.  During her tenure at the Commission, Nazareth worked on numerous groundbreaking initiatives, including execution quality disclosure rules, implementation of equities decimal pricing, short sale reforms and the modernization of the national market system rules.  She also served as the Commission’s representative on the Financial Stability Forum from 1999 to 2008.

As humans, we all hold implicit biases which create blind spots that subconsciously affect our understanding and decision-making. Such biases have continue to contribute to low diversity and inclusion rates in law. Paulette Brown, the first woman of color to serve as the president of the American Bar Association, offers concrete examples of biases at play in the legal profession, and what lawyers, firms, and companies can do to mitigate its harmful effects.

Paulette Brown is a senior partner and the Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer at Locke Lord LLP. She is a member of the labor and employment practice group. She is a past president of the American Bar Association (ABA). Previously, she served as in-house counsel to several Fortune 500 companies and served as a Municipal Court Judge. (0.5 Diversity California MCLE / Implicit Bias and Bias Reducing Strategies)

(0.5 Ethics California MCLE)

When criminals use shell companies, offshore bank accounts, and real estate as money laundering vehicles, lawyers, whether knowingly or unknowingly, assist these transactions. Professor William Simon explains how an unwitting lawyer could be complicit in the money laundering enterprise, the basics of money laundering laws and the risk factors, and suggests best practices for lawyers. Simon reviews transcripts from anti-corruption organization Global Witness from their 2016 sting operation where they secretly interviewed a number of New York lawyers seeking advice to launder fictional funds.

William H. Simon is the Arthur Levitt Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. Simon has also been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School and at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. From 1981 to 2003, Simon was on the faculty of Stanford Law School, and he is the emeritus holder of the Gertrude and William Saunders Chair there.