Customer Reviews

Complete Guide to Sarbanes-Oxley: Understanding How Sarbanes-Oxley Affects Your Business

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Professor Stephen Bainbridge's "Complete Guide to Sarbanes-Oxley" is a well-written, well-organized overview of a very complicated, very intrusive piece of federal legislation. It's as light as possible on the legal-ese, but heavy on the analysis and practical information.

There are two audiences for this important guidebook. First, this is a useful overview for attorneys who need to be "familiar" with Sarbanes Oxley and how this law may affect anyone with a general commercial litigation law practice, or who may represent corporate officers in matters not directly related to corporate governance. This is not meant to be the definitive, comprehensive treatise for big-firm securities lawyers. The prose would need to be too dense to be meaningful for us "dabblers" in corporate law who may occasionally represent a corporate officer.

Second, this is a useful overview for corporate officers, corporate counsel, and accountants. It would serve the same purpose as a traveler's phrase book, allowing you to "speak the language" of securities lawyers and corporate auditors in the event that a "situation" arises. I would even recommend that corporate lawyers, as an act of preventive maintenance, stock a supply of this book to pass out to their clients who are officers of publicly-traded corporations or high-profile non-profits.

If either of these is you, you want this handly summary on your bookshelf.

As an accounting student, I found this book very useful. The author is a lawyer, so the book's language gets a little legalese sometimes, but for the most part he explains SOX and its implications on managers as interestingly as possible (considering this is a book about a piece of legislation). I like that the author gives his opinions on various aspects of SOX, as opposed to just mindlessly listing the sections.