Global compliance and crisis management

Eversheds Sutherland’s Global Compliance and Crisis Management team provides comprehensive, timely solutions to the issues and incidents that keep you awake at night. Our incident response team is comprised of lawyers from across practice areas and around the world. They have the experience to provide rapid and practical advice on critical matters affecting your business.

By working with us, you will be able to remain focused on day-to-day business objectives while we develop a coordinated response. We mobilize quickly and work closely with you to ensure efficiency and efficacy and, where necessary, are ready to act on your behalf.

Experienced global compliance and crisis management lawyers

Our lawyers have extensive experience in handling parallel civil litigation and criminal investigations, multi-district proceedings, putative class actions, congressional investigations and hearings, regulatory investigations, shareholder direct and derivative claims and corporate disclosure issues. We also assist corporations in obtaining redress from contractors, suppliers and tortfeasors that have caused loss or harm in the course of crises.

We regularly serve as primary counsel and participate in every aspect of the response, including corporate disclosure, media management, investor relations, board communications, engagement with outside accounting and audit firms, litigation and regulatory investigations. Our lawyers also assist in evaluating the need for and preparing disclosures to government regulatory authorities and third parties.

In addition to this, Eversheds Sutherland helps clients in a variety of industries to prepare for crisis situations by developing incident response plans, performing periodic plan audits, and running training and drills to evaluate plan effectiveness and team responsiveness.

Our lawyers regularly handle:

anti-corruption and anti-fraud cases.
aviation disasters.
class actions.
corporate governance and compliance.
cybersecurity and privacy breaches.
employee theft and misconduct.
environmental disasters.
export controls.
government investigations.
officer and director misconduct.
natural gas blowouts.
pipeline incidents.
tanker collisions and train derailments.

Our experience includes:

dawn raids – we responded to a dawn raid conducted at one client’s offices by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI raid was part of a US-Canadian investigation. The ensuring crisis jeopardized key customer relationships and the viability of the business. We provided advice from the day of the dawn raid, through to entry of a guilty plea to certain charges and negotiating settlements with key clients to avoid civil litigation. We also worked with the client’s PR firm to address business fallout and to voluntarily notify potentially affected customers.

derailments – we have advised a state-owned transportation company on its legal and investigative response to a high-profile derailment that caused fatalities, injury and property damage.

oil-drilling incidents – we advised the owner of the drilling rig at the Macondo Well in the Gulf of Mexico, which experienced an incident in 2010. Eversheds Sutherland’s lawyers were engaged to provide advice on legal liability, investigations of numerous state and federal agencies, the appearance of key executives before congressional hearings and the production of documents to the US Department of Justice, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Chemical Safety Board, the National Academy of Engineering, congressional committees and the president’s oil spill commission. We collected and reviewed more than 70 million pages of data and responded to more than 50 document requests from litigants and government agencies. We also worked closely with our client’s PR firm to respond to the huge volume of inquiries from journalists, customers, investors and other stakeholders in a way that did not jeopardize our client’s legal interests.

automotive manufacturing – we have advised an automobile manufacturer on its response to allegations of misconduct in product testing and certification.

oil rig blowouts – we served as lead legal counsel to Hercules Offshore Inc in crisis management and incident response to a blowout at its Rig 265. The subsequent fire lasted for three days and all crew were evacuated. Eversheds Sutherland advised Hercules on the US Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement investigation, which commenced as soon as the crew arrived ashore. Once the fire was suppressed, investigations began to determine its cause and how to prevent similar events from occurring again. We also performed a full service of document review, retention and processing for Hercules in this matter and represented the company in two additional matters relating to the incident.

cyber extortion – we have advised a professional services company on its response to a cyber extortion incident. This included providing counsel on the data privacy, employee engagement, internal investigation, disciplinary proceedings and criminal extortion aspects of the matter.

In today’s non-stop media environment, it is more important than ever to be prepared to respond to a crisis. Whether it is a catastrophic incident on a drilling rig or an auditor’s discovery of questionable bookkeeping at corporate headquarters, your problems become our problems. Should the unthinkable occur, our team will do everything they can to help you identify and mitigate the risks to your business.