The PLI program Enforcement 2021: Perspectives from Government Agencies offers a unique opportunity to hear directly from senior staff at various government agencies. Chris and Kurt get a sneak peek at the program from Co-Chairs Robert A. Cohen (Davis Polk), Joan E. McKown (Jones Day) and Richard D. Owens (Latham & Watkins).
Featured in this Episode
Robert A. Cohen
Robert A. Cohen is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of Davis Polk & Wardwell. He is a member of the firm’s White Collar Criminal Defense and Government Investigations Group.
Mr. Cohen held senior positions in the Enforcement Division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during a fifteen-year tenure. He served as the first Chief of the SEC’s Cyber Unit, and previously was Co-Chief of the Market Abuse Unit. Mr. Cohen supervised a wide variety of high-profile cases, including investigations of complex insider trading; market structure violations by broker-dealers, trading platforms, and national securities exchanges; financial fraud and disclosure violations by public companies; investment adviser compliance and trading violations; cybersecurity controls; and cryptocurrency, initial coin offerings, and other digital assets.
Mr. Cohen is admitted to practice in New York, Maryland, and Washington, D.C.
Joan E. McKown
Joan E. McKown has more than thirty years of experience in U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement and financial regulatory matters, including investigations, exams, internal investigations, and disputes throughout the United States. She has in-depth knowledge of investigatory issues relating to financial fraud, corporate disclosure, corporate governance, accounting, compliance, private equity, FCPA, broker-dealers, investment advisers, investment companies, and insider trading. Joan represents corporations and financial services firms, and their officers, directors, and employees, counseling them to avoid regulatory scrutiny, and when necessary, resolving matters on the best terms possible.
Prior to joining Jones Day in 2010, Joan was the longest-serving chief counsel in the Division of Enforcement at the SEC, where she played a key role in establishing enforcement policies and worked closely with Commission and senior SEC staff. Joan literally wrote the book on SEC enforcement when she oversaw creation of the first version of the SEC Enforcement Manual. As chief counsel, she led hundreds of Wells meetings and settlement negotiations. At Jones Day, Joan has extensive experience submitting persuasive Wells submissions, having reviewed thousands of such submissions while on the SEC staff.
Richard D. Owens
Richard D. Owens is the Chairman of the Litigation Department in the New York office of Latham & Watkins. His practice focuses primarily on representing corporations and individuals in a wide variety of criminal and regulatory investigations and proceedings, as well as conducting internal investigations and advising on compliance matters. Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Owens served for more than twelve years as an Assistant United States Attorney in the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
From 2002 through 2006, Mr. Owens served as the Chief of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force. During his tenure as Chief, Mr. Owens supervised a team of approximately twenty prosecutors devoted to investigating and prosecuting securities fraud, commodities fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice. Mr. Owens was responsible for coordinating the Office’s criminal prosecutions with parallel civil matters brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission(SEC), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve Banks, the New York Stock Exchange, the NASD, and state regulators. Mr. Owens directly supervised some of the nation’s highest-profile prosecutions of corporate fraud and insider trading, including those related to WorldCom, Adelphia Communications, American BankNote, ImClone Systems, Impath, Inc., and Royal Ahold, N.V. Mr. Owens received the Attorney General’s annual Distinguished Service Award in 1996 for the successful prosecution of the Daiwa Bank and again in 2000 for the successful prosecution of Patrick R. Bennett in connection with the then-largest financial fraud in U.S. history. Mr. Owens has tried twelve felony cases, including two of the three largest criminal accounting fraud cases ever prosecuted in the Southern District of New York.
