Representing Individual Officers and Directors

Try the following exercise. Imagine a knock at your door at home at 7:30 a.m. The kids are getting dressed for school and you are having coffee with your spouse. You open the door to find two armed federal agents standing in full view of your neighbors with raid jackets that have the letters FBI emblazoned across the back. One of the agents hands you a letter that says, "[y]ou are the target of a grand jury investigation. The agent who handed you this has probable cause to handcuff you and take you to jail. The government is investigating mail fraud allegations that your firm over-billed your clients." Then the agent hands you a grand jury subpoena and asks if you have time for a little chat. You get the idea.

Any corporate employee targeted or charged today for white collar crime has entered a surreal world fraught with potential for emotional and financial disaster. And lets be clear. We are not talking about a corporate employee caught stealing or embezzling or engaged in some other form of self-dealing. We are talking about corporate employees who never put one penny of ill gotten gains into their pockets but who nonetheless find themselves targets in highly complex, and in many cases untested, "malum prohibitum" criminal cases.