Publications

For companies, navigating the ESG landscape means balancing various stakeholder demands, keeping abreast of rapidly-changing new laws and regulations, and calibrating contradictory litigation risks. Last week, this already-difficult landscape was complicated further by the Supreme Court’s June 28 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo,[1] overturning the Court’s long-held approach to regulatory deference embodied in the 40-year old Chevron doctrine. The Loper Bright decision could...

(Article from Insurance Law Alert, June 2024) For more information, please visit the Insurance Law Alert Resource Center. Holding In a unanimous opinion, the United States Supreme Court ruled that an insurer can intervene in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding of manufacturers subject to asbestos claims, finding that the insurer has standing as a “party in interest” under federal bankruptcy law. Truck Ins. Exch. v. Kaiser Gypsum Co., 2024 U.S. LEXIS 2483 (U.S. June 6, 2024). Background Kaiser...

On April 24, 2024, President Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act (“PADFA”). Effective June 23, 2024, the PADFA prohibits any “data broker” from transferring “personally identifiable sensitive data”—including both traditional categories of personally identifiable information and also emails, texts and photos kept for personal use—of United States individuals (defined as a natural person residing in the United States) to any “foreign adversary”...

On May 6, 2024, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) and the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) (collectively, the Agencies) jointly issued proposed rules for financial institutions’ incentive-based compensation arrangements as required under Section 956 of the Dodd-Frank Act, more than a decade after the rules were initially proposed in 2011 (and eight years after the agencies...

On April 23, 2024, the Department of Labor released a new rule[1] (the “Retirement Security Rule”) that re-defines the test for when one provides non-discretionary “investment advice” under ERISA. This memorandum focuses on the likely effect of the Retirement Security Rule, which goes into effect on September 23, 2024, on sponsors of both registered and unregistered (i.e., private) funds, and includes key takeaways for sponsors of both types of funds below. Fund sponsors may communicate and...

On April 15, 2024, the Seventh Circuit issued a long-awaited opinion addressing a would-be intervenor’s objection to mootness fees paid in connection with M&A strike suits brought challenging proxy disclosures in a public company merger transaction. Alcarez v. Akorn, 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 9070 (7th Cir. 2024) (Easterbrook, J.). The Seventh Circuit vacated an order denying the shareholder’s motion to intervene and remanded, instructing the district court to treat him as an intervenor.[1] Notably,...

Three years after the first anti-ESG law was passed in Texas, states continue to propose and adopt both anti- and pro-ESG measures in new variations. New York state legislators have proposed climate disclosure bills nearly identical to California’s groundbreaking SB 253 and SB 261 requiring disclosure of greenhouse gas emissions and climate risk reports, which are now the subject of litigation in a federal district court in California. Meanwhile, New Hampshire legislators have proposed a bill...