Global | Publication | August 2024
Why you should update your dawn raid guidance
Unannounced inspections or ‘dawn raids’ are used by antitrust authorities to obtain evidence when there are suspicions that individuals or businesses have infringed the antitrust rules. Often triggered by tip-offs from whistleblowers or confessions from leniency applicants, dawn raids provide investigators with an opportunity to swoop and seize information for subsequent interrogation and review. The surprise element of dawn raids offers reassurances to investigators that evidence of a possible infringement will not be destroyed.
Many businesses will have protocols for responding to a dawn raid. Typically, these include notes for receptionists on what do to if investigators arrive and detailed guidance for compliance teams about the need to ‘shadow’ investigators as they move around the office and to photocopy all documents before they are taken away. The issue that these protocols ought to cover – but often don’t – is how to deal with the arrival of digital forensic investigators.
Publication
In July 2022 the UK Secondary Capital Raising Review published its report (Report) setting out a series of bold and wide-ranging recommendations for improving the secondary capital raising regime in the UK designed to make it quicker, more flexible, more inclusive of retail investors and more cost-effective, as well as moving towards digitisation and making better use of technology.
Publication
This briefing forms part of a series looking in detail at the SRA’s guidance for in-house teams, issued following a thematic review of the sector, recognising the growth and importance of the in-house role and the unique pressures to which in-house solicitors can be subject.
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