Lawyer Monthly Magazine - March 2020 Edition

Jitka Logesová heads the firm- wide Corporate Investigation practice at Wolf Theiss covering the CEE/SEE region. She specialises in corporate investigations, compliance, corporate criminal liability/ white-collar crime and asset recovery. Before joining Wolf Theiss, Jitka established and built up a firm-wide compliance, risk and sensitive investigations practice at another regional law firm. She was tasked by the Czech General Prosecutors office to help draft the methodology for state prosecutors on how to evaluate corporate compliance management systems and to educate the state prosecutors in this respect. She has wide experience in various sectors, where she advised clients primarily on FCPA triggered issues and investigations, led a number of corporate internal investigations in CEE/SEE and advised on various compliance issues including setting up anti- corruption and compliance programmes. Jitka is Senior Co-Chair of the International Bar Association (IBA) Anti- Corruption Committee. She is also a Certified Auditor for ISO 19600 (compliance management systems) and for ISO 37001 (Anti-Bribery management systems). She has also published extensively on these topics and is a frequent speaker at compliance and anti-corruption conferences. Further, Jitka teaches a Business Ethics class as a guest lecturer at the Anglo-American University in Prague. “forced” by law enforcement authorities - to implement an effective compliance management system. The existence of an effective compliance management system is a precondition for the possibility to release the company from its criminal liability (compliance defence) and aims at preventing misconduct in the future. How should companies handle their reputation (with clients or the media) when undergoing a corporate investigation? It is of utmost importance to be prepared, even if the company is not in a crisis situation yet. The ‘crisis communication’ preparation should be a part of the first phase of the whole process and it should be based upon the background searches and be constantly updated throughout. The company should consider hiring a local agency with a substantial track record in crisis communication if it is not able to manage the situation using internal resources. It is necessary to appoint a manager responsible for coordinating these activities, prepare for various hypothetical situations and to involve the experts conducting the corporate investigation to the process. Lawyers need to be involved at all times during the communication stratégy. The potential legal consequences of every communications step should be taken into account. LM About Jitka Logesová 53 MAR 2020 | WWW.LAWYER-MONTHLY.COM An Interview With “Alleged violations of the FCPA are extremely sensitive to deal with. The potential of reputational damage is tremendous and it has serious consequences with respect to business.”