Pragmatism and Compliance

One of the reasons I enjoy working in the compliance area is its pragmatism, which I think is reflected in two important ways. 

First, compliance is a pragmatic area of study for students.  I have seen this with both my actual compliance students and my research assistants.  For example, one of my former students went on to apply for a position with the SEC Student Honors Program and was eventually placed with the Office of the Whistleblower.  She emailed me shortly after starting the program to explain how she felt prepared for the placement, because we had covered the SEC whistleblower program during class.  Similarly, my summer research assistants often email me after on-campus interviewing to explain how their summer working for me was helpful to them during the process.  Because much of the “law” I rely upon is not available on Westlaw/Lexis, I tend to conduct specialized training for my research assistants where we cover what an enforcement action is and different methods of identifying and analyzing information that is not available in case law databases.  For those students who end up in a regulatory or white collar practice for the summer or after graduation, they tend to have a bit of a leg up on their counterparts who may have little to no awareness of these sorts of enforcement documents.

Second, compliance is an area that has huge applicability and ramifications for practicing attorneys.  I love that each of my projects tackles a concrete problem confronting practitioners and leaders within industry and attempts to help them sort through potential solutions or considerations they should take into account.  When I send out my reprints, I probably send about 20% to people in practice at law firms, in-house at corporations, or senior government officials.  To my delight, I often get a response back, which allows me to have informal conversations that help me get a better understanding of the challenges and struggles faced by those within industry.  These conversations almost always help me to sharpen my ideas.  And I am hopeful that these interactions will aid me when I eventually transition to some qualitative projects, which I plan to start working on in a couple years.

There are, of course, other ways in which working in the compliance space is pragmatic; just as there are other scholarly areas with similarly pragmatic attributes.  But the pragmatism—for both my students and my scholarship—associated with compliance work is one of the things I enjoy about working in the area.