Tag: Paul V. May

Paul V. May Joins Pastore & Dailey as Counsel

Posted on by Liam Mennitt

Pastore & Dailey Managing Partner Joseph M. Pastore III announced today that Paul V. May will be joining the Firm as Counsel, concentrating on securities regulatory, enforcement and advisory matters.

Mr. May joins the Firm from ABN AMRO Securities, where he was Chief Compliance Officer of the FINRA member firm and its affiliated entities since 2010. Previously, Mr. May served in various compliance and legal capacities at Cowen and Company, ICAP and Royal Bank of Canada Capital Markets, in the Securities Industry practice at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, and as founding partner of Steere & May, a boutique financial services practice.

Mr. May began his legal career as an attorney in the Enforcement Division of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in New York from 1990 to 1995. He is a regular speaker at securities industry events including the SIFMA Annual Compliance and Legal Conference on topics including Preventing and Detecting Securities Fraud and Compliance Risk Assessment. He is co-author of Building an Effective Compliance Risk Assessment Program for a Financial Institution in the current issue of the Journal of Securities Operations & Custody.

Mr. May is also a founding trustee of the Holy Cross Lawyers Association and President of the Board of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence – an education and advocacy organization that encourages safe gun ownership and sensible firearms regulation.

Mr. May is a graduate of Brooklyn Law School and the College of the Holy Cross.

Mr. May is admitted to practice in New York, Connecticut, the Southern and Eastern District Courts of New York and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Mr. May can be reached by e-mail at pmay@psdlaw.net and by telephone at 646-665-2202 (office) or 516-662-7223 (mobile).

SEC Cuts Back on the Use of Administrative Law Judges

Posted on by Liam Mennitt

In the past two years, the SEC has drastically reduced the number of contested cases it has sent to its internal administrative law judges (“ALJs”). The number of cases sent to these judges had been increasing since 2010, when the SEC gained new powers under the Dodd-Frank Act.

From then on, and especially after the SEC decided in 2014 to expand the use of the ALJs to contested cases for crimes such as insider trading, members of the legal community have argued that it would be very hard for these judges to remain unbiased given the fact that one of the parties in every case they review is responsible for their income — in a much more direct way than a state or federal court judge. Additionally, the ALJs were generally appointed by a lower-level employee than one might expect (an issue which has led to Constitutional challenges, which are outside the scope of this article).

The Wall Street Journal analyzed the cases sent to the ALJs from October 2010 to March 2015, and found the SEC won 90% of these cases. While this could be attributed to the fact that the SEC does a thorough job investigating before charging defendants with a crime, the fact that the SEC was victorious only 69% of the time in federal courts casts some doubt on this. In fact, the Wall Street Journal has reported that in spring of 2015, the SEC director of enforcement, Andrew Ceresney, shifted the policy of the Commission back to putting contested cases in federal court. Since then, the SEC has been using the federal court system for contested charges. From October 2014 to September 2015, the SEC used the ALJs in 28% of the contested cases, whereas the year before ALJs heard 43%.