A month passes surprisingly quickly! I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to join Prawfs as a guest blogger and for the people that have reached out because of the posts. I’m also leaving with tremendous respect for folks like Howard that keep blogging year round.
After the jump, I flag two interesting business law areas that I plan to watch in the year ahead for interesting classroom material and potential scholarship ideas. In one area, changing technology and business practices may stress existing legal systems. In the other, new enforcement programs may change business culture.
Technological Innovation: Cryptocurrencies & Distributed Ledger Technology
The distributed-ledger technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin seems likely to continue developing in significant ways. I’ve had a number of students approach and ask about its implications for business and finance. While there are some scholars writing in this area already, it remains a developing field. In one recent event, an alternative cryptocurrency collective created a decentralized venture capital fund and raised $152 million for the project, leading the New York Times to call it “the most successful crowdfunded venture ever, by a significant margin.” The space remains volatile. This decentralized autonomous organization (commonly referred to as the DAO), was soon hacked, leading to a crash in the value of the currency associated with the project.
Legal Innovation: Whistleblower Bounty Programs
Regulators struggle to monitor complex businesses. The financial markets may be particularly tough to police. One promising technique may be going beyond protection against retaliation by paying whistleblowers bounties for good information leading to significant enforcement actions. While the SEC’s whistleblower program may be the most well known, states have begun to implement their own bounty programs. Indiana awarded $95,000 to a whistleblower earlier this month.
These programs and protections face some uncertainty. For example, it remains unclear how much protection against retaliation in-house counsel may have after reporting wrongdoing up the corporate ladder. Circuit courts have also split over whether Dodd-Frank’s whistleblower protections even apply to whistleblowers reporting problems to their managers inside the company. It’s also up in the air whether whistleblower retaliation claims will be resolved