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NEWS AND VIEWS,
TRENDS AND TACTICS, STRATEGIES, INSIGHTS, ADVICE,
LEGISLATION, REGULATIONS AND MORE
“Right now, diagnostic tests
largely answer
yes or no questions. You have a disease or you
don’t.
That is going to change.”
—Sarah Brashears
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This agreement promises, in
addition to promoting energy and environmental
security, to join India and American forces to
combat international terrorism. |
India: A Strategic
Partnership
With
the passage of the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear
Agreement, now before Congress, a new strategic
partnership between the United States and India is
at hand. It promises, in addition to promoting
energy and environmental security, to join Indian
and American forces to combat international
terrorism.
The strategic partnership could
stagnate, however, if Congress neglects to enact
enabling legislation to approve an initiative to
transfer civilian nuclear technology to India that
was concluded between the two nations on March 1,
2006. It places 14 out of India’s 22 nuclear power
reactors (existing and those under construction)
under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards
in perpetuity. In addition, it would place all
future civilian thermal power and civilian breeder
reactors under safeguard.
“The strategic partnership promises
significant economic benefits by furthering a
convergence of open market policies,” notes Graham
Wisner, a partner at Patton Boggs, which is leading
the legislative drive on behalf of the U.S. India
Business Council, which represents 200 U.S.
corporations interested in investing in the future
of India. With the opportunity to provide India with
civilian nuclear assistance to generate 20,000
megawatts of nuclear electricity, the United States
could boost exports by more than $25 billion,
creating more than 275,000 new American jobs.
Cooperation on civil nuclear technology will
encourage a convergence of economic policies. This
convergence will mean increasing opportunities for
the United States in such areas as retail, banking,
insurance, pension, military procurement and
infrastructure. In government procurement for civil
aviation, defense, power generation and civilian
nuclear plants, U.S. sales could be expected to
rocket from $79 billion to $309 billion with the
enactment of enabling legislation. And thanks to
India’s superior protection of property rights, its
rule of law and its surging middle class, the
trajectory of economic benefits to the U.S. is
likely to compare favorably with those associated
with China’s liberalization in 1978.
CT
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Customer Data:
Internet Privacy Policies
A
company’s failure to protect
customer data can open the door to
legal liabilities at both the state
and federal levels. Deborah M.
Lodge, a partner in the Washington,
D.C. office of Patton Boggs who has
helped many clients adopt
appropriate privacy policies and
procedures, says that the FTC has
brought cases against companies that
it felt failed to take reasonable
security measures to protect
customers’ personal information and
files. Lodge offers the following
advice on how companies can protect
customer data—and thus protect
themselves from lawsuits:
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1 |
Adopt reasonable
security measures to protect
personal customer information.
Tailor the level of security to the
nature of the data. For example,
more stringent safeguards are needed
for bank account numbers than for
email addresses. |
2 |
Adopt an
appropriate privacy policy that
reflects actual corporate
procedures, post it on the company’s
websites—and then actually follow
it! Having a privacy policy that you
are not properly following can be
worse than not having any policy at
all. |
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3 |
Make sure that all
employees who have access to
personal information and/or
technical systems know and follow
your company’s privacy policies and
procedures. |
4 |
Periodically audit
privacy procedures to make sure they
are working as intended. Don’t
forget to make sure that vendors or
business partners who give or
receive personal customer data also
have well-designed, well-functioning
privacy policies and that their
policies mesh with yours.
CT |
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After Katrina:
Funds Easy to Raise,
Hard to Spend
|
 When
former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill
Clinton toured the country last year raising
funds to aid Hurricane Katrina victims,
observers marveled at their fundraising
ability. But given the devastation caused by
the hurricane, the bigger surprise for
Patton Boggs partner George Schutzer was how
difficult it was for the Bush-Clinton
Katrina Fund to spend the $115 million the
Presidents had raised.
Schutzer has spent
about 300 hours working as pro bono counsel
to the Fund. He was surprised, for example,
that so few affected churches applied for
rebuilding grants. “Many churches have
totally disappeared,” Schutzer says. “The
constituency has gone, and there is no hope
of ever rebuilding.”
Some colleges
targeted by the Fund received much of the
money they needed through insurance payouts,
obviating the need for substantial grants
from the Fund. And when the Fund targeted
state-identified programs, governments that
were busy rebuilding were sometimes slow to
provide direction.
Nonetheless, awards
have exceeded $90 million for education,
health care, infrastructure and other needs,
says Bill Pierce, a vice president of APCO
Worldwide, which provided pro bono public
relations work for the Fund. The Fund
expects to be fully spent down (and to
close) soon after Katrina’s first
anniversary.
As thanks for their
service, Schutzer, Patton Boggs counsel Sean
Clancy and other pro bono service providers
were invited to the Houston home of
ex-President Bush, who also gave Clinton a
tour of his house. “Even though they’d
opposed each other in an election, they
appeared to be the best of friends,”
Schutzer says.
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New
Technologies:
More Questions than Answers
While worldwide health
care is a 2.5 billion dollar
industry, at present, only 1 percent of
those dollars is spent on diagnostics.
“Right now, diagnostic
tests largely answer yes or no
questions,” says Sarah Brashears,
executive vice president at Antara
Biosciences, Inc.“Either you have a
disease or you don’t. But in the future,
and in many cases, the very near future,
that is going to change.”
Brashears explains that
two types of diagnostic tests will
become more commonplace as genomic
testing progresses. The first type will
help determine if a person is likely to
develop a certain disease, such as
breast cancer or heart disease. The
second focuses on whether a specific
treatment would be successful in a given
person.
“A patient is going to
find out that he has, say, a 60 percent
chance that a certain genetic therapy is
going to be successful because it is
unlikely that a 100 percent answer will
be found,” Brashears |
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