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In his courses, Ted Banks helps students think through ethical and legal dilemmas from a compliance perspective.
Faculty Profile Ted Banks
Demystifying compliance
Ted Banks teaches students how to create an effective compliance program
What comes to mind when you hear the term “compliance”? Perhaps you recall a training module assigned by your employer or remember a media report on company corruption. Or maybe you envision the repercussions for employees who run afoul of federal regulations. Compliance is all those things—but it’s also so much more.
“It’s not just about checking a box that you have a compliance program,” says adjunct professor Ted Banks, partner at Scharf Banks Marmor LLC and president at Compliance & Competition Consultants LLC. Banks is a longtime compliance and enterprise risk management expert who has seen the field evolve over the last several decades. He teaches in the School of Law’s MJ and LLM programs in Compliance & Enterprise Risk Management.
“I always tell students that compliance draws on every course you took in college,” Banks says. “You took a psychology course? Great, you have to know how to motivate employees. You took education classes? Good, you have to know how to educate people. Did you take a history course? Well, you have to know the history of corporations.”
“Our overriding orientation is to put ourselves in the shoes of our audience.”
A career in compliance is an exercise not only in legal statutes and rules but in communication and education. Banks experienced this for himself during more than 30 years at Kraft Foods, where he helped design and implement a highly successful compliance program. “It’s much more satisfying for me to empower people to do the right thing than to clean up their messes after they’ve screwed up,” he says.
In his courses, Banks helps students think through ethical and legal dilemmas from a compliance perspective. “Our overriding orientation is to put ourselves in the shoes of our audience,” he says. “We want to design everything with the employees in mind.”
Students learn many techniques to engage employees, such as video, email, texts, and incentives. They become deeply familiar with the federal sentencing guidelines—what Banks calls the “blocking and tackling of every compliance room.” Then there are risk assessments, policy creation, procedures, trainings, and evaluation.
Banks uses real-life examples whenever possible, and students take turns presenting on a compliance issue in the news. For their final project, students synthesize everything they’ve learned to create a robust, detailed, and effective compliance program.
“That’s an excellent writing sample for job applications,” Banks says. “It shows that our students can hit the ground running in any compliance department in the country—and they do.” –Kelsey Schagemann (July 2024)
What comes to mind when you hear the term “compliance”? Perhaps you recall a training module assigned by your employer or remember a media report on company corruption. Or maybe you envision the repercussions for employees who run afoul of federal regulations. Compliance is all those things—but it’s also so much more.
“It’s not just about checking a box that you have a compliance program,” says adjunct professor Ted Banks, partner at Scharf Banks Marmor LLC and president at Compliance & Competition Consultants LLC. Banks is a longtime compliance and enterprise risk management expert who has seen the field evolve over the last several decades. He teaches in the School of Law’s MJ and LLM programs in Compliance & Enterprise Risk Management.
“I always tell students that compliance draws on every course you took in college,” Banks says. “You took a psychology course? Great, you have to know how to motivate employees. You took education classes? Good, you have to know how to educate people. Did you take a history course? Well, you have to know the history of corporations.”
A career in compliance is an exercise not only in legal statutes and rules but in communication and education. Banks experienced this for himself during more than 30 years at Kraft Foods, where he helped design and implement a highly successful compliance program. “It’s much more satisfying for me to empower people to do the right thing than to clean up their messes after they’ve screwed up,” he says.
In his courses, Banks helps students think through ethical and legal dilemmas from a compliance perspective. “Our overriding orientation is to put ourselves in the shoes of our audience,” he says. “We want to design everything with the employees in mind.”
Students learn many techniques to engage employees, such as video, email, texts, and incentives. They become deeply familiar with the federal sentencing guidelines—what Banks calls the “blocking and tackling of every compliance room.” Then there are risk assessments, policy creation, procedures, trainings, and evaluation.
Banks uses real-life examples whenever possible, and students take turns presenting on a compliance issue in the news. For their final project, students synthesize everything they’ve learned to create a robust, detailed, and effective compliance program.
“That’s an excellent writing sample for job applications,” Banks says. “It shows that our students can hit the ground running in any compliance department in the country—and they do.” –Kelsey Schagemann (July 2024)