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Business Partners: Business Watch—Corporate Monitors

New York partner George Stamboulidis, head of the firm's White Collar Defense and Corporate Investigations practice, was profiled in the November-December 2008 issue of Business Partners magazine in the article, "Business Watch—Corporate Monitors." Business Partners is the bi-monthly magazine of the American-Hellenic Chamber of Commerce.

The focus of the article are corporate monitorships, whose use "began in the U.S. in 1994 by the Justice Department as a way to ensure companies accused of serious crimes, such as fraud, mend their ways." Corporate monitors, which can be an individual lawyer or a legal team, oversee the workings of an entire organization in order to investigate and police the company in an effort to identify bad practices and institute corrective reforms, according to the article.

According to Stamboulidis, who was selected by the Department of Justice to serve as the monitor of Merrill Lynch and is the principal partner in Baker Hostetler's engagement as the monitor of the Bank of New York Mellon, the cost of a monitor pales in comparison to the expense of civil litigation or the cost of trying to save a company after an indictment.