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Arbitration: Is the Silver Bullet a Dud?
For roughly 25 years franchisors have fought hard in courtrooms, in the lobbies of Congress, and at the bargaining table to ensure that that disputes with franchisees would be resolved by arbitration. In large part, they have succeeded. The Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed both the enforceability of arbitration agreements and the desirability of arbitration itself, despite hostile state statutes and stubbornly recalcitrant state courts. Congress has turned a distracted, if not an entirely deaf ear to the efforts of franchisee- and trial lawyer-pressure groups to take franchise agreements outside the protection of the Federal Arbitration Act for all practical purposes. And arbitration provisions have become a standard term in franchise agreements.
Now, however, on the strength of a substantial body of real-world experience with arbitration as a dispute-resolution norm, many franchisors are asking whether all this effort has really paid off after all ' whether, in fact, their dogged pursuit of arbitration was actually a mistake. Doubts are emerging because the well-known downsides associated with arbitration seem far more worrisome as concrete realities than they did as abstract analytic factors, and because new concerns have appeared as arbitration has become more common in the franchise universe.
The DOJ's Corporate Enforcement Policy: One Year Later
The DOJ's Criminal Division issued three declinations since the issuance of the revised CEP a year ago. Review of these cases gives insight into DOJ's implementation of the new policy in practice.
Use of Deferred Prosecution Agreements In White Collar Investigations
This article discusses the practical and policy reasons for the use of DPAs and NPAs in white-collar criminal investigations, and considers the NDAA's new reporting provision and its relationship with other efforts to enhance transparency in DOJ decision-making.
How AI Has Affected PR
When we consider how the use of AI affects legal PR and communications, we have to look at it as an industrywide global phenomenon. A recent online conference provided an overview of the latest AI trends in public relations, and specifically, the impact of AI on communications. Here are some of the key points and takeaways from several of the speakers, who provided current best practices, tips, concerns and case studies.
The DOJ's New Parameters for Evaluating Corporate Compliance Programs
The parameters set forth in the DOJ's memorandum have implications not only for the government's evaluation of compliance programs in the context of criminal charging decisions, but also for how defense counsel structure their conference-room advocacy seeking declinations or lesser sanctions in both criminal and civil investigations.