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Lawyers for Bruce Matson asked Monday for a 37-month prison sentence for the former chief legal officer at now defunct law firm LeClairRyan, who pleaded guilty in July to obstructing a federal probe, Reuters reported. Federal prosecutors for the Eastern District of Virginia in Richmond, where Matson is set to be sentenced Nov. 22, requested 46 months in prison and a $250,000 fine in a separate filing on Monday. Prosecutors said Matson that misappropriated more than $4 million between 2015 and 2019, while he served as liquidation trustee for title insurance company LandAmerica Financial Group. Matson concealed his misconduct from the U.S. Trustee's office, which investigated the matter, they said. The maximum sentence Matson faces is five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a maximum supervised release term of three years. In arguing for a shorter sentence, Matson's attorneys said that he experienced a “tremendous fall from grace,” and was a respected bankruptcy attorney for more than three decades. They also referenced his cooperation with the court and voluntary surrender of his law license. He agreed to disbarment in November 2020.

Federal judges would be required to report stock trades over $1,000 within 45 days and post their financial-disclosure forms online under legislation proposed by a bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives, the Wall Street Journal reported. The two bills were drafted by both Democrats and Republicans in response to a Wall Street Journal investigation finding 131 federal judges violated federal law by hearing lawsuits involving companies in which they reported owning stock, according to congressional aides. The House Judiciary Committee also is considering a range of new accountability rules for the judiciary. It has scheduled a hearing Tuesday to examine “breaches identified in The Wall Street Journal’s report” about federal judges who hold stocks, and will question the chairwoman of the federal judiciary’s ethics committee and judicial ethics professors. Narrower bills in the House and Senate increase reporting requirements for judges who trade stocks frequently. The Journal investigation found 61 judges who didn’t just own stocks of companies that were litigants in their courtrooms. Accounts held by the judges or their families traded shares as suits were progressing. The Senate version of the stock-trading reporting bill, called the Courthouse Ethics and Transparency Act, would require judges to comply with the same law that applies to the president, vice president, presidential-appointed administration officials, senators and House members, according to congressional aides and a draft of the bill. That law, known as the STOCK Act — for Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge — requires government officials to report their financial transactions over $1,000 within 45 days.

Lawyers with the Securities and Exchange Commission have served a subpoena on Archegos Capital Management, the $10 billion family investment office that suddenly collapsed in March, roiling the stock market as its losses reverberated through the banking industry, the New York Times reported. The issuance of a subpoena is not particularly surprising as lawyers from the SEC, the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have been looking into the collapse of Archegos since its heavy bets on a small number of stocks rapidly unraveled seven months ago. Even so, the subpoena marks the transition to a formal investigation. Investigators are focusing mainly on whether Archegos’s founder, Bill Hwang, misled the banks through which he invested in sophisticated derivatives about the risk he was taking on at his firm. The SEC is also believed to be looking into whether Archegos violated any regulating rules that would have required the firm to disclose some of its hefty stock position. In appearances before Congress, Gary Gensler, the SEC’s chair, has said that the Archegos trading debacle revealed gaps in the regulatory requirements for investment firms and lightly-regulated family offices when it comes to disclosing big positions in derivatives.