USC Law will launch its new speaker series, “Conversations with the Dean,” on Thursday, Oct. 12.
Dean Edward J. McCaffery will host guests Bob Fairbank, the independent counsel to the lead plaintiff in the Enron class action suit and a USC Law lecturer, and Joe Shew, former CFO for Homestore.com, who pleaded guilty to charges of securities fraud in one of the major cases of the dot-com crash.
The lunchtime discussion will center on the criminal prosecution of Homestore.com and broader lessons learned from the Homestore case and the Enron and WorldCom collapses.
Fairbank is a highly respected attorney who in 2002 was retained by the University of California Regents to consult in the Enron, WorldCom, AOL/Time Warner and Dynergy securities cases. He began his legal career in the L.A. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Since co-founding Fairbank & Vincent in 1996, he has represented companies including Mattel, Hilton Hotels and Genelabs Technologies in complex business disputes.
An adjunct professor at USC Law, Fairbank teaches the seminar “The Enron Era: Lessons Learned.” Launched in 2004 at the height of the Enron securities scandal, the class focuses on corporate ethics and offers a case study on the former energy giant, which crumbled into bankruptcy proceedings in late 2001 after years of accounting fraud. The class has examined the collapse of several other corporations that met similar fates.
Shew began his professional finance and accounting career with New Jersey accounting firm Adams, Swartz & Co. He has worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers and The Walt Disney Company. He joined Homestore.com in 1998 and was named chief financial officer in 2001. In 2002, the U.S. Justice Department charged Shew and two other former Homestore executives with conspiracy to commit securities fraud for inflating the company’s revenues by millions of dollars. Represented by Fairbank, Shew pleaded guilty and in November will be sentenced to up to five years in jail.
Since leaving Homestore in 2002, Shew has been providing advisory services to entrepreneurs and small business owners.
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