Internal Investigations

Internal Investigations Remain Internal – Attorney Client Privilege Protected by D.C. Circuit

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On June 27, 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an important, unanimous decision upholding the assertion of attorney-client privilege for an internal investigation.  The decision is especially significant because it (a) forcefully reversed a growing trend in the D.C. federal district courts that had narrowly applied the attorney-client privilege to internal investigations and (b) confirmed that communications made during the course of an internal investigation – e.g., interviews and interview notes and reports – are privileged whenever a primary purpose of the communication was to obtain legal advice.

The case involves a False Claims Act claim against Kellogg, Brown & Root (“KBR”), a former Halliburton subsidiary, regarding alleged fraud and other unlawful conduct violating the company’s code of business conduct.  The plaintiff sought various materials relating to KBR’s investigation of the alleged conduct.  Non-lawyers, acting at the direction of in-house lawyers, conducted the interviews.

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Where There’s Thunder, There’s Lightning: SEC’s Investigation of IBM’s Cloud Computing Accounting May Be a Harbinger of a New Enforcement Focus

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Pen and Calculator

Cloud computing may be the next shoe to drop. On the heels of Mary Jo White’s recent appointment as Chairman of the SEC and predictions that it may refocus enforcement on accounting fraud came word last week that the Commission is investigating IBM’s cloud-computing accounting. In an SEC filing, IBM defended its revenue accounting for cloud-based services, stating “[w]e are confident that the information we have provided has been consistently accurate.”

This may just be the tip of the iceberg for an industry estimated by some analysts to generate global revenues of $131 billion this year, 60% of which originate in the United States.

Cloud computing has no single definition but one basic expression would be the practice of storing and accessing information on servers accessed through the Internet. There are many cloud-computing business models, including Infrastructure as a Service (“IaaS”), in which customers access computing power, such as servers, through physical equipment owned by the provider; Platform as a Service (“PaaS”), in which customers use a provider’s computing environment—including operating systems, programming languages, and databases—to create applications remotely; and Software as a Service (“SaaS”), services that allows users to operate software remotely. Google Documents and the e-Discovery platform Relativity are just two cloud-based services that readers may be familiar with. READ MORE →