Your Business Deserves To Thrive

Securities Laws

What is Securities Law, Why Does it Matter, and What are the Basics of Compliance?

You’ve probably heard this term securities law floating around, but you’re a small or medium-sized company. What does it matter to you? Truth is, it matters a lot. A lot of people think of the FCC, investigations, big things on security law, so they think it’s companies like General Electric, IBM, Google, Facebook, other companies that are publicly traded on…

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What’s an Investment Company in the Very Basics, and Why You Care

I was recently corresponding with a client who was throwing around the words “investment company,” and what they were actually forming was a company that was buying an asset. Saying “investment company” is something you want to be very careful about because it has a very specific meaning in the securities regulations under state and federal law. There’s, in fact,…

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Start with the Right Team: Get a Great Accountant Early

R. Shawn McBride recently published an article to the McBride For Business Blog on a topic that might be of interest: Start with the Right Team: Get a Great Accountant Early. He talks about one of the keys for business success is having the right team. This posting is intended to be a tool to familiarize readers with some of…

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Keys to Protect Your Business: The Laws of Empowerment To Excel in Your Business

R. Shawn McBride recently published an article to the McBride For Business Blog on a topic that might be of interest: Keys to Protect Your Business: The Laws of Empowerment to Excel in your Business. He examines why it’s critical when putting plans together that there be an element of protection. You can see the full article here. This posting is…

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Two Lessons from Goldman Sachs’s $36.3 Million Penalty for Unauthorized Use and Disclosure of Confidential Supervisory Information

Previously, we discussed the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (“SEC”) order against Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC (“Morgan Stanley”) in connection with the company’s failure to safeguard customer information (see the SEC order here).  As we reported earlier, there have been a number of high profile data breaches lately, resulting in big administrative penalties and consent orders against violators.  The Federal…

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Definition of Accredited Investor To Be Expanded? (Part III)

On February 1, 2016, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 2187, titled “Fair Investment Opportunities for Professional Experts Act.”[1]  The bill, whose stated purpose is to direct the SEC to revise its regulations regarding the qualifications of natural persons as accredited investors, seeks to expand the definition of accredited investor.  Specifically, the bill proposes to add non-financial measures of sophistication…

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Definition of Accredited Investor To Be Expanded? (Part II)

In our last post, we looked at the recent recommendations by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (“SEC”) Advisory Committee on Small and Emerging Companies (the “Committee”) to expand the definition accredited investor.[1]  For those who are familiar with the Committee’s activities, this was not the first time it recommended expanding the definition of accredited investor.  In March 2015, for example,…

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Definition of Accredited Investor To Be Expanded? (Part I)

In our previous blog post Raising Capital Through Exempt Offerings, we talked about some of the most commonly used exemptions for securities offerings.  Of note, we mentioned that Rule 506 promulgated under Regulation D is the most widely used transactional exemption for securities offerings, used in more than 90% of all exempt offerings in the United States.[1]  To understand how…

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SEC Enforcement Update: Morgan Stanley Agrees To Pay $1 million Penalty for Failure to Safeguard Customer Information

As many of you know, there have been a series of big data breaches recently—the BlueCross BlueShield data breach involving more than 1 million members’ subscriber information, the Anthem data breach that exposed more than 80 million patient and employee records, and the Army National Guard data breach caused by an improper handling of data transfer to a non-accredited data…

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