A year ago, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was the target of jeers such as its lawyers “couldn’t find ice cream at a Dairy Queen.” Members of Congress were seriously considering stripping away agency powers in a regulatory overhaul.
Now, the SEC is all but swaggering down Wall Street in the wake of the April 16 fraud complaint against The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., as well as an across-the-board rise in enforcement activity. But securities lawyers wonder whether the SEC, in a bid to prove its re-emergence as a tough cop on the beat, has bitten off more than it can chew. “It’s going to be a challenging time at the agency,” said Russell Duncan, a partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in Washington who was assistant chief litigation counsel in the SEC Enforcement Division’s trial unit from 2003 to 2006. “The SEC has a number of very fine attorneys, but it’s a finite resource.”
