By Sara Kropf Where the government indicts someone affects a host of key elements of a criminal case: How quickly the defense team will obtain key pretrial discovery; the composition of the jury pool; the speed of the trial; and likely outcomes for sentencing. In...
By Sara Kropf When 98% of federal criminal cases are resolved by plea agreements, you may expect that courts would fiercely protect defendants’ constitutional rights during the plea bargaining stage. Nothing could be further from reality. In fact, the Supreme Court...
By Sara Kropf When about 98% of federal criminal cases end with a plea bargain, the sentencing process plays a much larger role in a white-collar defense lawyers’ practice than most people realize. At sentencing, we try to focus the court on the client as a person and...
By Sara Kropf It’s hard to believe that it was only a year ago that CoinDesk broke the story that kicked off the investigation into Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX, and Alameda Research. Since then, we’ve heard about SBF's $35 million Bahamas penthouse, the supposedly...
By Rebecca Guiterman Trade secrets cases are on the rise. Most often, they happen when an employee steals confidential computer code or client lists or marketing plans. You may think of them as disputes between employers and employees (or, in one instance, by a...
By Sara Kropf Protective orders in criminal cases are . . . . typical. Boring, even. (Are you really going to read a blog post about protective orders?) But even the most mundane procedural matters seem to take on outsized importance when they arise in the criminal...
By Sara Kropf In case you’ve been living under a rock recently, former President Donald Trump was indicted on 37 federal criminal charges relating to classified documents and obstruction of justice. I’m not going to deny that I enjoy this spectacle in many respects,...
By Sara Kropf When a regular person does something wrong, the Department of Justice has no qualms about bringing criminal charges against him. When the Department of Justice does something wrong, well, it asks for a second chance. A few years ago, I wrote about...
By Sara Kropf Our good friend Sarah Hall wrote an excellent article in the ABA’s Criminal Justice Magazine with Zachary Taylor about the investigation of allegations of abuse in women’s professional soccer conducted by Sally Yates for the U.S. Soccer Federation. The...
By Sara Kropf The Department of Justice repeatedly issues guidance to beg coerce encourage companies to self-report wrongdoing and, in effect, sell out their executives as the wrongdoers. As part of this “cooperation,” companies will conduct an internal investigation,...