When the DOJ will give companies cooperation credit [infographic]

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broadcat iconCourtesy of The Broadcat
Ricardo Pellafone (ricardo@thebroadcat.com)

When the Department of Justice comes knocking, cooperating with their investigation usually softens the blow.  And historically, they treated company cooperation on a sliding scale:  some cooperation could yield some leniency, a lot could yield more.

And then the Yates Memo happened, and now…not so much.

Yesterday, Deputy AG Sally Yates expanded (slightly) on the Yates Memo’s cooperation point in a speech; we’ve summarized her commentary below.

The only policy change is the all-or-nothing approach to credit, but take special note of that last bit on legal privilege. This isn’t new, but it means that now’s a good time to go over how privilege actually works with your legal and compliance teams.

Here’s why:  we guarantee that you have at least one lawyer at your company who thinks everything they say or hear is privileged. That’s never been true, but with the DOJ ramping up their rhetoric it’s a good idea to get everyone on the same page. You really don’t want one of your lawyers running their own unsupervised investigation because they think they confer privilege on everything.

(And if you need help on privilege, tell your outside counsel it’d be super duper if they did a free lunchtime refresher for your team on it. They live for stuff like that.)

Cooperation Credit DOJ Guidance

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