BulletProofBlog the blog on crisis communications

University endowments across America are dwindling faster than Sarah Palin's prospects for 2012. At a time when even the largest university budgets are feeling the effects of the economic crisis, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is hoarding hundreds of millions of dollars which could potentially ease the burden on many schools, many of whom are resorting to such belt-tightening measures as cutting trash collection in half. The 1984 Supreme Court decision, NCAA v. Board of Regents ... READ MORE

Yesterday's Supreme Court ruling that state regulators can take national banks to court in order to enforce state consumer protection laws is yet another blow to the principle of "preemption." For those non-constitutional law scholars out there, preemption is the means by which federal law supersedes state law when contradictions between the two arise. In this case, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and his predecessor Eliot Spitzer sought to enforce state consumer protection laws against ... READ MORE

In this regular feature, Bulletproof interviews top plaintiffs' attorneys for their perspective on the crises likely to affect businesses in the near future. Today we talk to Stephen D. Susman of Houston's Susman & Godfrey LLP. In the decades since his landmark 1980 victory, in which he won an award in excess of $550 million for victims of a nationwide price-fixing conspiracy, Mr. Susman has commanded the respect of business leaders and lawyers alike, on ... READ MORE

It's happening just as predicted. Federal regulators are keeping their promise to levy massive penalties against companies that violate the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which Congress passed last year in response to the tsunami of food, toy, and consumer product recalls in 2007. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has announced that toy maker Mattel Inc. and its Fisher-Price subsidiary must pay a $2.3 million civil penalty to settle allegations that they knowingly imported ... READ MORE

The action that had been expected for almost a month - and what, it now turns out, had been in the offing since before the subprime mortgage meltdown publicly gave way to a global financial crisis - finally came to pass yesterday when the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) brought civil charges of fraud and insider trading against former Countrywide Financial Chairman and CEO Angelo Mozilo. As the face of the company at the center of ... READ MORE

President Obama last week announced his intention to end Bush Administration rules that were written to protect companies from product liability litigation in state courts. While consumer advocates and trial lawyers cheered this move against federal preemption, business leaders widely see it as a full-employment act for the plaintiffs' bar that will likely result in a significant uptick in lawsuits and the reputational liabilities that go along with them. What many businesses find most troubling about ... READ MORE

A big part of the Waxman-Markey energy bill that passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee yesterday is about limiting carbon dioxide emissions and their contribution to global warming. There are still those who argue passionately that global warming is an unproven theory and that spending trillions in an effort to keep the planet cool is a foolish waste of money. The weight of scientific opinion, however, seems to come down on the other side of ... READ MORE

In this regular feature, Bulletproof interviews top plaintiffs' attorneys for their perspective on the crises likely to affect businesses in the near future. Today we talk to Douglas B. Abrams of Raleigh, NC's Abrams & Abrams, P.A. Mr. Abrams, a leading advocate for plaintiffs in automotive disasters, talked about evolving liabilities as well as likely systemic changes that will define vehicle safety in the years ahead. How do you see the new Administration and Congress affecting ... READ MORE

Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an endangerment finding that classifies greenhouse gases as a threat to public health - a move that paves the way for the federal government to regulate the emission of such gases for the first time in American history. While many still question the science behind global warming and how greenhouse gases contribute to it, perception is reality. The widespread belief that greenhouse gas emissions are damaging our ... READ MORE

In the wake of near-complete financial breakdown, an uptick in the volume of securities lawsuits is hardly surprising. But the numbers are still sobering. In March 2009, for example, Navigant Consulting, Inc. released a ground-breaking report titled "2008: Seeking Relief" that showed a whopping 576 new litigation matters filed in federal courts in 2008 as a direct result of the severe market downturn. The subprime-related issues driving these increases were already in full play before the ... READ MORE