Bloomberg Law Publishes Akin Gump Analysis of SEC’s Recordkeeping Rules for Investment Advisors

Bloomberg Law has published the article “INSIGHT: SEC Required Recordkeeping in an Evolving Privacy Landscape,” written by Akin Gump litigation partner Peter Altman and associates Annie Banks and Kelly Handschumacher. The article examines the balance between the needs of SEC-registered firms to monitor employee communications and employees’ rights to privacy.

The authors begins with a look at a recently filed suit in which a former investment adviser employee “sued his employer under various federal and state laws because of the employer’s purported accessing of the employee’s personal device and email account.” Altman, Banks and Handschumacher write that “SEC-registered investment advisers (“RIAs”) are required to maintain, and therefore must be able to access, certain records of the business, which may necessarily involve email communications and other electronic data.” Compliance with Rule 204-2 of the Advisers Act, they say, “is crucial for RIAs.”

The article goes into detail on the ways in which investment advisers can access and retain information about its employees’ electronic activity. It then offers some best practices for RIAs, pointing out that, since there is no one-size-fits-all solution, “RIAs should consider custom policies and procedures that reference, as needed, both employer-owned and personal devices and different mediums of electronic storage and communication.” This, the authors write, “will help answer the difficult questions of whether an employer has ‘authorization’ to ‘access’ the vast amounts of data that employees generate on a daily basis.”

To read the full article please click here.