CLG maintains a competitive advantage by providing compliance support within the purview of an attorney client privilege. This attorney client privilege protects your legal advice from disclosure to regulatory agencies, enforcement authorities and opposing parties in litigation. This protection is crucial to allow you to seek legal guidance on potential compliance issues without fearing that your proactive efforts to comply with the law could later be used against you.
We structure supervisory and compliance programs including customized, risk-based and practical compliance policies and procedures and code of ethics. We draft supervisory controls and compliance procedures from a best practice standard with first-hand knowledge of how regulators and investors examine and evaluate the soundness of a compliance program. We prepare customized attestation and disclosure forms, including, new account forms, compliance forms, supervisory forms, attestation forms, and employment forms.
We prepare compliance training materials and conduct firm wide employee training to keep associated persons up to date on firm, regulatory and industry related priorities. We also assist with annual needs analysis and written training plans based on size, structure, scope of business and regulatory concerns.
We provide continuous regulatory and compliance counseling and partner with clients to develop and implement streamlined, practical solutions, for their day-to-day operations. We also conduct periodic reviews, annual reviews, and look-backs of various compliance areas, including the following:
Investment Adviser:
- Insider trading compliance, including research due diligence, expert network arrangements, trading restrictions and best practices
- Product and line-of-business compliance
- Advertising, marketing, website, social media and applicable disclosures and disclaimers
- Solicitation arrangements with third parties
- Trade errors, proprietary trading, trade allocation, market manipulation, directed brokerage, soft dollar arrangements and best execution
- Portfolio management
- Valuation
- Expense allocation
- Privacy and cybersecurity
- Business continuity plans
- Reputational and fiduciary issues, including personal trading, outside business activities, private securities transactions, gifts & entertainment, political contributions and FCPA
- Conducting OFAC/SDN checks of employees, clients and investors
- Review electronic communications
- Anti-money laundering
Broker-Dealer:
- Advertising, marketing, website social media and applicable disclosure and disclaimers
- Best execution
- Books and records
- Commissions and mark-ups
- Cross-border issues
- 15a-6 chaperoning arrangements
- Development of new securities products and services
- Distribution of mutual funds and variable insurance products
- Private placements
- Due diligence
- Gifts and entertainment, “pay to play” and FCPA
- Net capital and customer protection rules
- Trade errors, proprietary trading, trade allocation, market manipulation, soft dollar arrangements
- Sales practices
- Soft dollar arrangements
- Client referral, foreign finder and foreign associate arrangements
- Information barrier policies and procedures and review of such barriers (e.g., integrated firms with active banking, research and trading operations)
- Business continuity plans
- Privacy and cybersecurity
- Review electronic communications
- Anti-money laundering
We counsel clients on the laws and regulations that impact AML compliance, including the Bank Secrecy Act, USA PATRIOT Act, FinCEN regulations, OFAC sanctions and criminal money laundering statutes. We assist clients in designing an AML compliance program, incorporating best practice that meet with regulatory approval, conducting compliance audits and providing training on customer identification programs, know your customer, enhanced due diligence, suspicious activities reports, bank secrecy reporting, OFAC/control list compliance, and other information requests from the U.S. government.
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