George Stamboulidis, who serves as Managing Partner of the firm's New York office and co-leader of the national White Collar Defense and Corporate Investigations practice, was quoted in the May 27, 2010, Corporate Counsel article, "Help Me Deal: New Guidance on How Companies Can Cope With Monitors."
According to the article, the Department of Justice recently issued a memo to its department heads and U.S. attorneys that they should include new language in any deferred or non-prosecution agreement to help a corporation deal with its monitor. The memo is a supplement to an initial memo issued in March of 2008. The added wording is to "explain what role the Department could play in resolving any disputes between the monitor and the corporation." The memo states that if a monitor's recommendation is impractical or burdensome, the company can propose an alternative and Justice will consider both, according to the article.
Stamboulidis said the amendment "is a positive one that expressly codifies what a lot of people understood to be the case anyway." The DOJ has four times appointed Stamboulidis, a former federal prosecutor, as a monitor. He is currently serving a monitorship as part of a consent decree between the government and Local 14-14B of the International Union of Operating Engineers. He added that the new language "may provide comfort to a monitoree corporation, if it believes a monitor's recommendation is cost prohibitive or not sensitive to practical business needs."