Will ‘Yates memo’ affect Antitrust Division plea policy?

When a corporation agrees to plead guilty to an antitrust crime, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division’s long-standing practice has been to enter into a plea agreement that protects all but a handful of the corporation’s executives and employees from prosecution. This practice appears to conflict with the department-wide policy announced this fall in the so-called “Yates memo” on “Individual Accountability for Corporate Wrongdoing.”