Paul Hastings LLP is a global law firm that represents a client base in finance, M&A, private equity, and litigation. The firm specializes in white collar and government disputes, energy, infrastructure, and intellectual property. Paul Hastings has been ranked on The American Lawyer’s A-List for eleven consecutive years, in 2020, was named Transatlantic Firm of the Year at the British Legal Awards, and in 2021, Most Impressive Investigations Practice of the Year at the Global Investigations Review Awards.
This article provides an overview of real-time bank-to-bank payments in the United States, examining the recent launch of FedNow and the challenges it faces in gaining traction against established payment platforms like PayPal and Zelle. Although bank-to-bank real-time payment solutions have gotten traction around the world, the U.S. has lagged behind. The core issue lies in the architecture of account-to-account (A2A) payment systems. Such systems necessarily require the coordination of multiple parties and their respective financial institutions, resulting in significant transaction frictions. The adoption of the new Article 12 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) creates an opportunity for the introduction of a new direct and entirely digital real-time payment solution. These changes pave the way for more direct, efficient, and real-time payments and may pave the way to broader adoption of real-time payments in the U.S. The article draws a parallel to book entry transfers in the securities industry and argues that direct real-time payment through controllable payment intangibles (CPIs), the primitive created by the amendments to the UCC, may achieve similar efficiencies. It concludes by emphasizing that CPIs can coexist with A2A systems.
Working remotely has compounded vulnerabilities; cybercriminals have exploited the pandemic as an opportunity to target companies. Even before the pandemic, data breaches were increasing in both breadth and scope. According to data from Norton,1 the first half of 2019 saw 3,800 publicly disclosed breaches, exposing 4.1bn records.2 That reflected a rise of 54 per cent, compared with the same time period in 2018.3 States across the country have started to react, enacting privacy, data security, cyber security and data breach notification laws, and courts have continued — slowly and inconsistently — to embrace broader theories of potential recovery by victims of those breaches. The past two years have seen several noteworthy developments in the courts and in the legislatures. This paper examines those judicial developments, as well as state statutes and regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA), the 2019 amendment to the Massachusetts Data Breach Notification Act (MA-DBNA) and the New York Stop Hacks and Improve Electronic Data Security Act of 2020 (SHIELD Act). After examining those developments, this paper concludes with insights into best practices in light of the ever-shifting judicial, legislative and regulatory climate surrounding data breaches.
This Concurrences special set of articles focuses on antitrust law and enforcement in the aftermath of the American Presidential Elections. It questions the changes and challenges expected in…
Sexual harassment is a clear blight on modern society, and far too prevalent. Yet approximately 70% of individuals who experienced harassment at work never file a formal complaint, largely out of fear of retaliation. It is often the human enforcing the policy—and not the sexual harassment policies themselves—that fail the harassed. This paper explores a deceptively obvious solution to human error; removing the human. While unthinkable even a few years ago, advances in Artificial Intelligence reveal a possible road to this end. And, with it, plenty of potholes and hazards to trip those with even the purest intentions.
