On the regulatory front, several new federal privacy rules go into effect this year. By June 1, 2010, many financial institutions and creditors will need to adopt written programs, pursuant to the Federal Trade Commission’s Red Flags rule, that are designed to identify, detect, and respond to red flags of identity theft. By that same date, securities broker-dealers, investment advisers, and other entities registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission will need to develop compliance approaches under Regulation S-AM, which limits the ability of SEC-registered firms to market customers based on data obtained from their affiliates absent a notice and opportunity for customers to “opt-out.” In addition, banks and other financial institutions now have the option of using a new model privacy notice to inform customers about their privacy practices. Firms electing to use the new form notice, which was adopted in December by the FTC, SEC, and federal bank regulators, obtain the benefit of a regulatory safe harbor.

For a very complete analysis from Corporate Counsel click here.

23 September 2009

The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission announced on Tuesday that they will explore updating their horizontal merger guidelines, the first such change in 17 years.

Christine Varney, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said the government would hold a series of public workshops to assess potential changes to the guidelines, which antitrust enforcers use to measure the competitive effects of proposed mergers. Varney, who spoke at a Georgetown Law Center symposium on antitrust law Tuesday, said the assessment would examine whether the current guidelines accurately reflect agency practice.

“As the guidelines themselves state, they are not meant to be static documents fixing in stone the agencies’ analytical framework,” she said. “Instead, as the guidelines note in their opening section, they ‘may be revised from time to time as necessary to reflect any significant changes in enforcement policy or to clarify aspects of existing policy.’”

For the full article from the National Law Journal and a link to Christine Varney’s full comments click here.