Throughout the week over at Securities Docket, I highlight the most interesting columns and blog posts from around the web on the subjects of SEC enforcement and securities litigation. Here is a digest of my picks for the week ending July 8.

Scandal Enforcement at the SEC: Salience and the Arc of the Option Backdating Investigations

SSRN | Stephen Choi, Adam Prichard, Anat Carmy Wiechman | Jul 8, 2011

We study the impact of scandal-driven media scrutiny on the SEC's allocation of enforcement resources. We focus on the SEC's investigations of option backdating in the wake of numerous media articles on the practice of backdating. We find that as the level of media scrutiny of option backdating increased, the SEC shifted its mix of investigations significantly toward backdating investigations and away from investigations involving other accounting issues. We test the hypothesis that SEC pursued more marginal investigations into backdating as the media frenzy surrounding the practice persisted at the expense of pursuing more egregious accounting issues that did not involve backdating....

SEC works to get rid of “The Lease to Nowhere”

footnoted | Sonya Hubbard | Jul 8, 2011

The temperature may have officially reached the high 80s yesterday afternoon in Washington, D.C., but we bet it was significantly hotter in room 2167 of the Rayburn House Office Building. That's where the SEC's Chairman, Mary Schapiro, and its Inspector General, H. David Kotz, were in the hot seat to answer questions for the Congressional Sub-Committee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management (which falls under the auspices of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure) about the $556 million, 10-year lease that the SEC signed last summer for 900,000 square feet of space in D.C.'s Constitution Center.

Australia's Litigation-Funding Giant Looks Abroad

The Asian Lawyer | Anthony Lin | Jul 8, 2011

Third-party litigation funding has started to receive greater attention in the United States and the United Kingdom, but Hugh McLernon has no doubt about where it all began. "It started right here, right in this building," says the co-founder and managing director of IMF (Australia) Ltd., meeting with a reporter in the company's offices in Perth. "It started right where you're sitting.".... In [McLernon's] view, the rules of the Australian game have instilled a discipline in IMF's approach to funding cases that will enable it to thrive anywhere, whether in a more competitive, potentially more regulated Australia of the future or in the land of litigation excess, America.

In Shift to New Court, Risks for Madoff Trustee's Case

DealBook | Peter Henning | Jul 5, 2011

When it comes to the Madoff bankruptcy case, the venue matters. Prominent lawsuits filed by Irving H. Picard, the trustee in the case, will be reviewed in Federal District Court rather than in United States Bankruptcy Court. It is an important shift, one that may result in the dismissal of some claims and limit the amount Mr. Picard can recover for investors.

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