By Sara Kropf The Sean “Diddy” Combs criminal case has garnered plenty of attention for its salacious allegations. Rather than parsing the RICO and other charges, however, I’m going to capitalize on the case to explain some of the nuts and bolts of pretrial practice...
By Sara Kropf As we enter 2025, we want to thank all our loyal readers for taking the time to visit Grand Jury Target and read our posts. When we updated our website late in 2022, we moved our blog “in-house,” so to speak, so people looking at our bios could also see...
By Sara Kropf Some of our clients who are under investigation by an Office of Inspector General (OIG) believe that the investigation is “political.” They are often convinced that they are under investigation because of their political views or because they were...
By Sara Kropf The Covid-19 pandemic changed how lawyers do our work. Depositions and meetings are conducted via Zoom instead of having everyone travel to one place. But one thing that (mostly) hasn’t changed is trial. Everyone physically gathers in a courtroom: the...
By Rebecca Guiterman Last week, the Second Circuit upheld Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking conviction and 20-year sentence. On appeal, one of the questions presented was whether Mr. Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with the United...
By Sara Kropf In late 2017, I represented a client who participated in a protest against the inauguration of Donald Trump in the District of Columbia on January 20, 2017. She was charged with conspiracy to engage in felony rioting, among other things, and faced the...
By Sara Kropf A few weeks ago, a California federal jury acquitted two former executives of the British software company Autonomy of conspiracy and wire fraud charges. It was a remarkable outcome, particularly since Autonomy’s CFO had been convicted of similar charges...
Note: A shorter version of this post was published by Bloomberg News on May 14. You can find the article here. By Sara Kropf I’ve written before about the Department of Justice’s questionable tactics in an FCPA case against two former executives for Cognizant...
By Sara Kropf Note: A similar version of this article was also published in Law360. When the Department of Justice indicts a defendant or prevails at trial, the Office of Public Affairs issues a press release. Those press releases tout the seriousness of the charged...
By Sara Kropf It has become a running joke among the defense lawyers I know that we can’t wait to see what the Department of Justice will announce as its newest “cooperation” policy at the annual ABA White Collar Crime conference. The ABA conference is the largest of...