Pillsbury Lawyers Comment on Key 2014 Regulations and Cases

Required under Dodd-Frank Section 165, the Federal Reserve is expected to finalize its prudential regulatory requirements for foreign banks. The new rules would require international banks with a significant presence in the U.S. to create a holding company that would be subject to all to the prudential rules that their U.S. competitors are subject to. Joseph Lynyak, a partner in Pillsbury’s Los Angeles finance practice, commented, “That is certainly something that will affect a big, big swath of the international financial services industry if they have to start creating holding companies.”

Last November, the Supreme Court agreed to take on Halliburton Co. et al. v. Erica P. John Fund, which challenges the 1988 Basic v. Levinson decision establishing the fraud-on-the-market theory that has underpinned most recent securities class actions. Bruce Ericson, co-leader of Pillsbury's securities litigation team and managing partner of the San Francisco office, said the court’s ruling has the potential to “blow up” class certifications for SEC Rule 10b5 cases.

Discussing Congress’s waning interest in taking up environmental issues, Anthony Cavender, Houston-based senior counsel in Pillsbury’s environmental practice, predicted that “there's such a complete and utter deadlock in the Congress, if anything is going to be done it's going to be done in the regulatory arena.”

Following the Deepwater Horizon accident, a key goal of the Obama administration is to improve safety and prevent another major oil spill. The Interior Department's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement is scheduled to release a draft blowout preventer rule in early 2014 and finalize the rule before the end of the year. “They really want to make sure that operations out there are safe,” Cavender said. “A lot of people thought the oil spill response plans that were investigated following the Deepwater Horizon spill were inadequate. The response of the government is to take a real hard look at the regulation of offshore activities.”