Chief Legal Architect and a co-founder of Caffrey.AI
Steven Lofchie is the Chief Legal Architect and a co-founder of Caffrey.AI, an AI platform built for law firms, banks, and the financial regulatory industry. He is also a partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, where he advises financial institutions on securities laws, the Commodity Exchange Act, and broker-dealer regulation. Ranked by Chambers USA every year since 2007, he is the author of “Lofchie’s Guide to Broker-Dealer Regulation,” long considered the leading treatise on the subject.
Recent Articles & Comments
The implicit statement of the Senators' letter is that the SEC's rule proposals would likely not survive a legal challenge under the Administrative Procedures Act. The data that the Senators requested is of a type that would be an issue in such a legal challenge.
From a policy perspective, there is no reason for the SEC to fail to respond to the Senators' request for information. The SEC should provide any information that supports, or may refute, its position. That is the…
The Associations make a number of very significant legal points in their letter. The first is that the broker-dealer record keeping requirement is far broader than the investment adviser recordkeeping requirement. This seems very straightforward on the words of the different rules and based on the regulatory history of the rule applicable to investment advisers, as recounted in the Associations' letter.
The second point is that the SEC should not treat the violation of an adviser's…
There is another way to entice private issuers to become public companies, and that is to reduce the burdens of being a public company. Not only do the majority of commissioners appear to be ignoring the past, but the new regulatory burdens they are proposing, such as ESG requirements, would make going public even more expensive and thus less attractive.
There is some trade-off between the benefits of going public and those of staying private. If the only inducement regulators will…
The FRB should address custodial services in digital assets. Allowing regulated banks to provide such services to retail investors would potentially reduce a significant risk to which such investors are now subject, as the collapse of FTX demonstrates.