The Five Corporate Scandals That Defined 2015 and Why I Resolve to Sneak More Ethics and Compliance into My Teaching

This is the time of year when many people make New Year’s resolutions, and I suppose that law professors do so as well. I’m taking a break from teaching business associations next semester. Instead, I will teach Business and Human Rights as well as Civil Procedure II. I love Civ Pro II because my twenty years of litigation experience comes in handy when we go through discovery. I focus a lot on ethical issues in civil procedure even though my 1Ls haven’t taken professional responsibility because I know that they get a lot of their context from TV shows like Suits, in which a young “lawyer” (who never went to law school) has a photographic memory and is mentored by a very aggressive senior partner whose ethics generally kick in just in the nick of time. It will also be easy to talk about ethical issues in business and human rights. What are the ethical, moral, financial, and societal implications of operating in countries with no regard for human rights and how should that impact a board’s decision to maximize shareholder value? Can socially-responsible investors really make a difference and when and how should they use their influence? Those discussions will be necessary, difficult, thought-provoking, and fun.

I confess that I don’t discuss ethics as much as I would like in my traditional business associations class even though some of my 2Ls and 3Ls have already taken professional responsibility. This is particularly egregious for me since I spent several years before joining academia as a compliance and ethics officer. I also use a skills book by Professor Michelle Harner, which actually has an ethics component in each exercise, but I often gloss over that section because many of my students haven't taken professional responsibility and I feel that I should focus on the pure "business" material. Business school students learn about business ethics, but law students generally don’t, even though they often counsel business clients when they graduate.

Yesterday, I tweeted an article naming five corporate scandals that defined 2015: (1) the Volkswagen emissions coverup (2) the "revelation" regarding Exxon’s research warning of man-made climate change as early as 1981 and its decision to spend money on climate change denial; (3) climate lobbying and the “gap between words and action,” in particular the companies that “tout their sustainability credentials” but are “members of influential trade associations lobbying against EU climate policy”; (4) the Brazil mining tragedy, which caused the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history, and in which several companies are denying responsibility; and (5) the “broken culture” (according to the Tokyo Stock Exchange) of Toshiba, which inflated its net profits by hundreds of millions of dollars over several years.

All of these multinational companies have in-house and outside counsel advising them, as did Enron, WorldCom, and any number of companies that have been embroiled in corporate scandal in the past. Stephen Bainbridge has written persuasively about the role of lawyers as gatekeepers. But what are we doing to train tomorrow's lawyers to prepare for this role? Practicing lawyers must take a certain number of ethics credits every few years as part of their continuing legal education obligation but we should do a better job as law professors of training law students to spot some of the tough ethical issues early on in every course we teach. This is especially true because many students who graduate today will work for small and medium-sized firms and will be advising small and medium-sized businesses. They won’t have the seemingly unlimited resources I had when I graduated in 1992 and went to work for BigLaw in New York. Many of the cases I worked on were staffed with layers of experienced lawyers, often in offices from around the world. If I naively missed an issue, someone else would likely see it. 

So my resolution for 2016? The next time I teach business associations, I may spend a little less time on some of the background on Meinhard v. Salmon and more time on some of the ethical issues of that and the other cases and drafting exercises that my students work on. If you have ideas on how you weave ethics into your teaching, please comment below or email me at [email protected].

I wish all of our readers a happy and healthy new year.