In case you missed it: we got a major shout-out from Hui Chen in her Compliance Week keynote. Here’s what happened.
Wait, who?
Know all about Hui Chen? Skip this part.
If not: hey, welcome to compliance! So glad you're here.
Hui Chen wrote the Department of Justice’s original Evaluation of Corporate Compliance Programs back in 2017. You know, that thing that tells you how to do your job.
She was the DOJ’s first (and still only) in-house compliance expert, was formerly in-house compliance domestically and overseas at tech, pharma, and finance companies, and was a former prosecutor to boot. She famously resigned her post in 2017 and now consults, does research at Rutgers, and speaks in pretty much every country ever.
It’s probably not much of a stretch to say she’s the most important person in this field overall—there are important prosecutors and in-house folks and academics and domain experts (whatup!) but Hui is one of the few people, if not the only person, who has done all of those jobs.
Put simply, you should be aware of her work because she is the person who defined how your work will be evaluated.
What Hui said about us.
So, Hui’s keynote was on the next generation of compliance. And if you were in the audience—or if you just look at the photo at the top of this post, you might have noticed some of her slides had a familiar art style.
(And thanks to Forrest at Abercrombie and Ronnie at Kimberly-Clark for both coming up afterwards to let us know they were like “this is Broadcat stuff” before Hui actually mentioned us.)
She spoke about our work during the section on Integration of Risks and Data. We've known Hui for a while—she was the first non-Broadcat to get a copy of our book, and the only person to critique it as "not going far enough" (!)—and we helped her build out an example of integrating compliance guidance into the process of selecting a distributor for this presentation.
I took a video so I could make a transcript, so here’s what she said, cleaned up a little for clarity:
Instead of us thinking about what’s convenient for us, we think about what is the process like for the businesspeople, for operational people, and how can we embed ourselves to deliver a just-in-time system of training, reminders, do’s and don’t’s.
Is this a pipe dream?
No, there’s actually work that’s begun in this area.
So, I worked on these slides with a startup company called the Broadcat, and what they have done is actually doing this in the training space.
So instead of training people when it’s convenient for them [the compliance team] and subjecting them [the employees] to 50 different types of videos that you have made or workshops that you’re putting together, they’re embedding a lot of this information that people need to make decisions into the process when it’s supposed to happen.
Ricardo, are you here in the room somewhere?
[Me: Yup. Hey.]
[Hui trying to see over stage lights]
[Me: waves wildly, awkwardly]
Hey, there you are. That’s Ricardo from Broadcat. I worked with Ricardo and his team in actually putting together these few slides.
Pretty neat, right? Now we've been described in an academic journal as a behavioral compliance best practice and been recognized in a keynote as part of the next generation of the field—by the woman who defined how programs should work.
And now that we've spent years building out all of this guidance, we're ramping up how we help people with it, too: with Compliance Design Club—it's the easiest on-ramp to getting a next-generation, well-designed compliance program through a la carte resources.
