By: Sara Kropf The government loves to encourage us to be “green.” Drive a Prius and get a tax credit. Put solar panels on your house and get a tax credit. Heck, buy the right kind of heat pump for your house and get a tax credit. But these are small scale. The...
By: Sara Kropf It’s the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, so I’m taking a break from serious white collar prosecutions. The “Batkid” story has been all over the internet the last few weeks. It’s an amazing, heartwarming story about how thousands of people in San Francisco...
By: Sara Kropf In certain fraud cases, defendants allegedly target groups of victims, such as the elderly or members of an ethnic or religious group (commonly known as “affinity” fraud). But, today, I bring you two cases that involve a very specialized group:...
By: Sara Kropf Trade secret cases are fascinating. They give some insight into how companies develop research; how valuable that research is; and the steps these companies take to protect research from being leaked to competitors. Trade secrets are stored on...
By: Sara Kropf Michael Mitrow, Jr. and his brother Matthew Mitrow were recently charged in a superseding indictment for a corporate kickback scheme in the Southern District of New York. The Brothers Mitrow were executives of an unnamed marketing agency. According to...
By: Sara Kropf I don’t watch the TV show NCIS. But I get the premise: clean-cut agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigate crimes in the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. The agents are the good guys. The bad guys . . . are, well, the other people....
By: Sara Kropf For most white-collar cases, the key issue at sentencing is the calculation of the loss amount. Although not mandatory, the Sentencing Guideline range will unquestionably influence the final sentence. And the Guidelines rely heavily on the loss amount...
By: Sara Kropf If you thought legal work related to asbestos is limited to those late-night television ads asking if you (or anyone you know) suffer from mesothelioma, you’d be wrong. There is apparently a niche criminal defense practice out there, representing people...
By: Sara Kropf This is the one of my recurring posts that offer quick summaries of similar cases. Think of them as the Kay and Peele version of my blog posts, though not nearly as funny and always safe for work. The Beastie Boys bemoaned that there are “too many...
By: Sara Kropf As I follow the press releases of the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices around the country every week in my relentless effort to find interesting white-collar cases, sometimes a case jumps out at me because it is a little bit different. I see a lot of health care...