Lisa Phelan was present at the creation of one of the most dynamic corporate leniency programs in government – the antitrust corporate leniency program.
Phelan spent more than 25 years at the Department of Justice prosecuting antitrust crimes before joining Morrison Foerster as a partner in Washington, D.C.
“I was among the group that recognized that it could be very challenging to prove a criminal antitrust case because it requires that you have employees rat out their bosses,” Phelan told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “When that person’s livelihood depends on their job, it can be very challenging to get anyone to come forward or admit what was going on.”
“About thirty years ago, several of us put into motion the leniency program. By definition, an antitrust crime is collusion by multiple companies in an industry, we came up with this concept that if one of them would come forward first, and tell us that a cartel exists, that collusion is happening within an industry, then that company will not be prosecuted and the executives, if they fully cooperate, they too will not be prosecuted.”
“This created a great incentive for an insider set of witnesses to come forward, because the fines involved could be tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars for participating in one of these kinds of cartels. When we started the corporate leniency program, we weren’t sure how it would work. It seemed unusual at the time for a defense counsel to bring a company...
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