Law - Corporate Compliance Certificate - MSL Program

The Graduate Certificate in Corporate Compliance is an 11-month, accredited, online program that fills a growing need for compliance professionals and leverages the University of Pittsburgh School of Law’s reputation and expertise in this area.

As international trade and globalization continue 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 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 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 covers key foundational topics in corporate compliance, and it enhances 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 teach the four mandatory and one elective 3-credit courses over the course of the 40-week program. The required curriculum covers legal aspects of corporate compliance; ethics and compliance; designing, measuring effectiveness, and auditing compliance programs; and conducting investigations and risk assessments. In addition, several electives are 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 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 includes individuals, as well as for-profit and nonprofit corporations, and hybrid and governmental entities.

The program helps 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