After One Year, Enforcement Edge Going Strong

One year ago, in the midst of the pandemic haze and uncertainty, we launched the Arnold & Porter Enforcement Edge blog to identify and discuss the enhanced enforcement scrutiny coming out of the COVID-19 crisis. With the help of two outstanding associates, Shira Anderson and Emma Dinan, and our partner Murad Hussain, we created an outlet for Arnold & Porter attorneys to blog about real-time enforcement and compliance issues and to provide practical news and insights to help guide you through an ever-evolving environment.

The results have been amazing, and starkly confirmed what we had suspected—that Enforcement Edge addressed an unmet need. Our posts early on in the COVID-19 pandemic about price gouging (when we were all still stockpiling toilet paper and hand sanitizer) and DOJ’s new compassionate release guidelines garnered thousands of page views. We began tracking enforcement actions targeting fraud, waste, and abuse of COVID-19 relief funds with our CARES Act Fraud Tracker and noted DOJ’s evolving use of data analytics to pursue PPP fraud.

As we all increasingly relied on our electronic devices to conduct business and stay in touch with loved ones, cybersecurity became an increasingly important topic. Once Americans again started boarding planes and traveling overseas, we wrote about issues bearing on law enforcement access to your personal devices as you cross the border. The Supreme Court considered and finally weighed in on a longstanding circuit split regarding interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And major hacks and cyber-attacks disrupted government agencies, gas pumps, meat production, and countless industries, prompting new US sanctions against Russia and legal uncertainty about how companies should respond.

The news of vaccine rollouts and an incoming Biden Administration spurred talk of enhanced enforcement activity in areas ranging from foreign corruption to environmental crimes. We covered the confirmation hearings of Arnold & Porter alum Merrick Garland to serve as Attorney General, highlighting new DOJ priorities and areas of enforcement scrutiny such as racial justice, antitrust enforcement, and domestic terrorism. And we continued to track new enforcement actions and priorities, delivering digestible and insightful content about the latest in white collar enforcement and compliance.

Enforcement Edge draws on Arnold & Porter’s deep bench of White Collar Defense & Investigations attorneys, as well as attorneys in a variety of regulatory areas of interest, including Antitrust, Environment, Financial Services, Healthcare, Securities Enforcement, and National Security. For any questions, comments, or concerns, please reach out to blog contributors or to the editorial team. And stay tuned for the next exciting year of Enforcement Edge!

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© Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP 2021 All Rights Reserved. This blog post is intended to be a general summary of the law and does not constitute legal advice. You should consult with counsel to determine applicable legal requirements in a specific fact situation.