Commercial Litigation Update

What General Counsel and Business Leaders Need to Know

• One National Standard: The U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) Corporate Enforcement and Voluntary Self-Disclosure Policy (CEP) creates a national policy for how the DOJ may award companies cooperation credit for the voluntary self-disclosure of corporate misconduct in the criminal context.
• A 120-Day Clock: The CEP gives a company 120 days to self-report after a whistleblower’s internal complaint, signaling that the DOJ may treat anything past roughly four months as untimely—far less time than most internal investigations take to finish.
• Disclosure as a Business Decision: A company’s decision to self-disclose misconduct is no longer just a legal judgment call but a business-critical risk decision that can have real financial and reputational consequences.

In this episode of Speaking of Litigation^®, Epstein Becker Green attorneys Zachary S. Taylor, Melissa L. Jampol, and Elena M. Quattrone break down the DOJ’s new CEP and what it means for how quickly companies must investigate, escalate, and decide whether to self-disclose potential misconduct.

In September 2025, the U.S. Attorneys’ Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (EDPA) announced that it would be implementing a White-Collar Justice Program to strengthen its white- collar enforcement framework. Among other things, the program will “empower Assistant United States Attorneys to aggressively pursue complex investigations and significant new matters on their own initiative.”

This announcement demonstrates another step in federal districts ramping up their white-collar enforcement efforts while encouraging robust procedures for compliance and self-disclosure. This is a trend several years in the making: in September 2022, then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco directed U.S. attorneys and others within the DOJ to review their policies on corporate voluntary self-disclosure, and to draft and share a formal written policy to incentivize such self-disclosure, if one was lacking.

Building on attempts in recent years to strengthen the Department of Justice’s (DOJ’s) white collar criminal enforcement, on September 15, 2022, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco announced revisions to DOJ’s corporate criminal enforcement policies. The new policies, and those that are in development, further attempt to put pressure on companies to implement effective compliance policies and to self-report if there are problems. Notably, the new DOJ policies set forth changes to existing DOJ policies through a “combination of carrots and sticks – with a mix of incentives and deterrence,” with the goal of “giving general counsels and chief compliance officers the tools they need to make a business case for responsible corporate behavior” through seven key areas: