Law - Corporate Compliance Certificate

Return to: School of Law

The Online Graduate Certificate in Corporate Compliance seeks to fill a growing need for compliance professionals and leverage the Law School’s reputation and expertise in this area.

As international trade and globalization continues to grow, U.S. corporations doing business abroad and foreign corporations doing business with U.S. corporations find themselves subject to a multitude of U.S. legal compliance requirements. Organizations are starting to recognize reputational risk can be as great as or greater than strategic, financial or operational risks.  As a result, compliance programs are growing as many organizations implement them to prevent and detect misconduct and to protect the interests of employees, shareholders, and businesses and to guard against reputational risk.

Compliance professionals are key to ensuring that organizations are complying with their own policies and procedures as well as applicable legal statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions.

The Online Graduate Certificate in Corporate Compliance is designed for U.S. and foreign corporate employees who work or wish to work in the corporate compliance area, such as lawyers, paralegals, and other compliance professionals in finance, internal audit, human resources and environmental sustainability, in order to enhance their careers by expanding their knowledge, skills, and professional understanding of corporate compliance.

The program will cover key foundational topics in corporate compliance, and it will enhance the ability of students to understand the fundamentals of corporate compliance, to design a compliance program as well as related policies and procedures, and to evaluate the effectiveness of ethics and compliance programs. Faculty - both full-time and part-time - who teach or practice corporate compliance will teach the four mandatory and one elective 3-credit courses over the course of the 40-week program. The required curriculum will cover legal aspects of corporate compliance; ethics and compliance; designing, measuring effectiveness, and auditing compliance programs; and conducting investigations and risk assessments. In addition, there will be several electives available to students who wish to specialize in a particular area of compliance such as Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Antitrust, International Trade and Export, Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices, and Securities compliance.

Students will learn how to establish an effective program to monitor organizational misconduct; to ensure that employees and third parties have mechanisms in place to report misconduct and seek advice; to audit compliance and ethics risks; and to evaluate the effectiveness of the ethics and compliance program as well as other issues around public company disclosures and compliance programs. The potential clientele discussed will include individuals, as well as for-profit and nonprofit corporations, and hybrid and governmental entities.

The program will help position students for leadership in:

• Corporate compliance and ethics
• Regulatory affairs
• Compliance program training
• Policy development, including CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) and ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance)
• Auditing and monitoring
• Financial fraud
• Environmental and other corporate compliance