Overview
The end of a government investigation or enforcement action is not the end of a company's legal risk; it is the beginning of a supervised remediation period. Consent orders, deferred prosecution agreements, non-prosecution agreements, and plea agreements all impose ongoing compliance obligations that are monitored by regulators, independent monitors, or both. A violation of those obligations can reopen the enforcement action or trigger a new one.
Fridman Fels & Soto counsels companies through the post-investigation phase with the same rigor applied to the investigation itself: building compliance programs that satisfy regulatory requirements, training employees and management, documenting remediation steps, and communicating with monitors and regulators in a way that builds the compliance record the company needs for eventual release from oversight.
Michael Garcia's accounting background and compliance expertise, developed over ten years of White & Case investigations for global companies, allows the firm to engage directly with the substantive compliance questions: what controls are actually adequate, what monitoring is genuinely effective, and what documentation will satisfy regulators and independent monitors who have seen inadequate programs before.
Our Approach
Post-investigation compliance begins with a gap analysis: what did the investigation reveal about the company's actual compliance failures, and what does the enforcement resolution require the company to do about them? The gap between those two is the compliance program that needs to be built. We work from the enforcement resolution's specific requirements and build backward to the program design.
Independent compliance monitors, required by many DPAs and consent orders, need to be managed as a relationship rather than a burden. The company that builds a genuine compliance record, communicates proactively with its monitor, and demonstrates measurable improvement exits monitorship on time. Companies that treat the monitor as an adversary create risk of extension and additional findings.
