We represent companies and individuals from the first subpoena through resolution, in civil and criminal investigations by federal and state agencies.
A grand jury subpoena. A civil investigative demand. An SEC subpoena for documents and testimony. An administrative subpoena from an agency you did not know had subpoena power. A letter asking for a voluntary interview, which is not voluntary in any sense that matters.
What you do in the first two weeks sets the shape of everything after. Preservation obligations attach immediately and a deleted file becomes a second case. The scope of a demand is usually negotiable, and almost nobody negotiates it. An employee who sits for an interview without counsel can create a problem the company cannot later fix. And the decision that matters most, whether to produce, to object, or to move to quash, has to be made before you know what the government is actually looking for.
We take that call. We deal with the agency directly, narrow what has to be produced, put a litigation hold in place that will survive scrutiny, and work out who needs separate counsel before anyone talks to anyone.
In a government-facing matter, what the agency knows, how it is thinking, and how it decides are worth more than any argument you can make after a complaint is public. We staff every civil and criminal enforcement matter with at least one former federal prosecutor who has been inside that process.
Where the facts allow it, we resolve these matters through negotiation with the government before a formal action is filed, which protects a client’s privacy and reputation as well as its balance sheet. Where they do not, the same preparation is what sets the terms of whatever comes next.
We appear before the Department of Justice, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, FINRA, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General, the Medicare Fraud Control Units, the Florida Office of Financial Regulation, and the Florida Attorney General.
Enforcement rarely arrives on one track. A False Claims Act investigation runs beside a criminal health care fraud inquiry. An SEC matter runs beside a United States Attorney’s office. A regulator refers, and a second agency opens a file. Answers given on one track are evidence on the other, and a strategy that solves the civil exposure can create the criminal one.
Every lawyer here has tried cases, and most came out of federal prosecutors’ offices, so the parallel-track judgment is not something we outsource to a second firm. Where a matter proceeds to charges, see Criminal Defense. Where the exposure is a company’s own conduct and no agency has called yet, see Internal Investigations & Compliance.
