The big questions raised by Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI
The FTC has filed a lawsuit to block the largest supermarket merger in American history. The regulator moved to block Kroger’s $25 billion bid for Albertsons, warning that the deal would raise prices and damage the bargaining power of union workers.
Insider trading from home
The husband of a former BP mergers and acquisitions executive who pleaded guilty this month to tapping her calls and then using what he learned to make illegal money $1.76 million is not the only one who abuses remote working to obtain confidential information. For example, there is also the Chief Compliance Officer (yes, the Chief Compliance Officer!) who is accused of acting on information he stolen from his girlfriend’s laptop. (He pleaded guilty under a cooperation agreement with the Justice Department.) Or the husband who, while taking phone calls from his wife on the way to a family vacation, learned that her company would not meet profit expectations and was shortly thereafter shut down. accused of insider trading. (He agreed to pay the SEC more than $300,000 to settle the charges, without admitting or denying the allegations.)
It’s not a new problem, but the post-Covid era of remote working has made it more common. And companies are not prepared for it. “Many employers have quite strong data protection measures in place,” says Laura Sack, partner at Davis Wright Tremaine. “Less attention is paid to less sophisticated ways to breach confidentiality, such as having a conversation that is overheard.”
Treating family as an exception to confidentiality is a common but risky approach. “Do I think this happens every day? Yes,” said Robert Hinckley Jr., a shareholder in Buchalter’s Denver office. “Do you do that as a lawyer? No.” Sack cites a hypothetical worst-case scenario: You share confidential information with your partner, and if you break up, that person tries to use it against you. Ellenor Stone, a partner at Morris Manning & Martin, says she tells her clients sometimes tells of the former principal of a prep school who was awarded an $80,000 discrimination settlement – which the school later refused to pay. with reference to a confidentiality agreementafter his daughter posted about it on Facebook.
Can confidential conversations even take place in the work-from-home era? Stone, who often works on sensitive human resources issues, says that if she knows someone else can overhear her, even at home, she will message the person she’s talking to and come up with code words for the conversation — for example, “If I say Bob I mean Brian, and when I talk about back surgery, I’m talking about Brian’s heart condition. Sack said her husband had referred to her parked car as a “mobile office” during the pandemic because it was often the only place she could guarantee she wouldn’t be within earshot of anyone else.