The Blue Highway Beacon: Vol. II, NO. 4

The Rule of Law, Or..?

By Ian Christopher McCaleb, BHA Founder & Principal

A significant number of new recipients have joined our email list for this latest distribution of the Blue Highway Beacon, the “as warranted” newsletter of Blue Highway Advisory, and Blue Highway Global. 

…Though, Blue Highway Global will soon be debuting its own regular publications, notices and client alerts. Please be on the watch.

For now, however, many of the new additions to our list are distinguished legal practitioners, and while the expansion of our reach wasn’t deliberately timed for this sort of reflective analysis, the ongoing chatter and post-mortem reflections over last week’s American Bar Association annual White Collar Crime Conference in Miami give us just a moment to put our hand in the air and offer some observational empathy from slightly afar.

We didn’t attend this year’s White Collar Crime Conference, though I have attended past versions in Miami and San Diego in my years-past former roles as litigation, crisis and investigations lead at two much larger and frankly less personal and personable agencies. But many clients and friends were there this year.

Anyone who is in the know is ‘in the know’ about these events – the nighttime hours at these conferences are as electric as can be, as attendees do their best to absorb everything that was thrown at them during some predictably rigorous daytime panels. And many of those panels routinely and necessarily include the participation of the very same Department of Justice prosecutors and policymakers against whom conference attendees will do battle in Federal courthouses through the rest of the year.

Officially, that’s the reason most white-collar attorneys attend these things after all – to get the latest guidance from the Department in areas as diverse as corporate self-reporting, financial crimes, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), and many more prime areas of focus of the Department’s Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney’s offices.

This year, in contrast, for those of you in attendance and those keeping tabs from afar, was a bit of a tip, wasn’t it? No Department of Justice presence whatsoever. 

The DoJ didn’t send one operative, never mind anyone who could have provided even a modicum of guidance or insight as to the new Department’s prosecutorial priorities. In the ‘what does it all mean,’ category, we, perhaps like you, have to see that conference vacuum in the same light as the peripheral situations now faced by Covington and Burling and Perkins Coie, as well as the strange no-man’s land of the post-public-comment timeframe while the Department considers how it will restructure FARA compliance.

Most of us, most likely, for the first time in memory, don’t have a real sense of what the immediate future holds. And we’re not staking out any sort of partisan position or preference when we say this – we’re genuinely a bit stumped. 

Our regular U.S. law firm contacts, no matter their persuasion, are just as eager to get a sense of the future as we are.

We’re not content to wait things out, however, and as we’ll be demonstrating over the next several weeks via this newsletter and via other means, Blue Highway is pushing itself to get ahead of trendlines and unexpected events, so surprises aren’t, in essence, surprises. 

We’re already recognized as one of the foremost litigation communications and legal support services boutiques in the United States, and our newly established Open-Source Intelligence (OSInt) sister firm, Blue Highway Global, has caught fire after just three weeks of operation. We’re not built to wait around for murkiness to clear itself up on its own. We’re built to help you push and power through.

From our intelligence and analysis experience to law-firm-specific advisory, consulting and marketing services (including internal communications expertise, a ‘must’ in these strange times), to top-tier case support, media relations and litigation comms, there’s no boutique firm better situated, or specifically built, for that matter, to handle what is, or what isn’t, about to come our way.

So, as we’ve been telling other of our clients, don’t wait for the dust to settle. It might not. And specifically, for our new legal sector subscribers, we, like you, believe wholly in the Rule of Law, and no matter your political or social persuasion, we’re certain we can be of help to you, no matter the issues, complications or dangers you or your clients are facing.

But if Rule of Law morphs, in time, to Law of Rule, we, as we imagine you, are ready for that too.