While the import/impact of the gargantuan financial reform legislation slowly dawns on an overloaded corporate consciousness (and financial regulators ponder their occassionally sketchy mandates), Health Care Reform has kicked into a new implementation gear; with its own army of regulators issuing a slew of new guidance, notably on group health plans. 

Not content with the @100 Dodd-Frank Act rules that it is charged with implementing, the SEC has also issued a concept release that would rewrite the rules by which 600 billion shares are voted annually in the United States. Dubbed the "proxy plumbing" release ("plumbing" in the political context apparently linguistically rehabilitated 40 years after Watergate) due to its extensive aspirations, this initiative is not expected to impact the proxy process until the 2012 "season."

On the subject of watery scandals, law firms continued to cover the Deepwater Horizon spill and political ripples lapping at the sometimes slippery banks of the Potomac. We noted with interest Ashurst's preference for "Macondo" over "Deepwater Horizon" in its Alert on the subject and that none of Ashurst's U.S. peer firms were inclined to be so diplomatic vis-a-vis BP.

Much was also written last week on efforts  to ring-fence a second much-maligned, offshore source of oil; with both the EU and US ramping up their Iran sanctions.

Whatever the developments, we bring it all together in Hot Topics to give you an extraordinary range of legal and commercial insight into how change can be managed by corporate America. On the menu bar above you will see a link to what is keeping lawyers up late tonight trying to fix/anticipate your problems called "Most Recent Hot Topics" as well as everything else from the last six months sorted by "Area of Law," "Corporate Function" and of course "The Credit Crisis."