White Collar Crime

In May, Matthew R. Galeotti, Head of the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, issued a department-wide memorandum setting forth the department’s enforcement priorities in the white-collar crime sphere. In it, the department announced an effort to combat crime that “poses a significant threat to U.S. interests,” including the “enabling of shadow-banking and sanctions evasions by hostile nation-states and terror regimes.” A potential obstacle to these enforcement efforts is the doctrine of foreign sovereign immunity. This doctrine, as its name suggests, has been used by courts to grant judicial immunity to foreign states, their instrumentalities, and their respective heads of state.

As regulatory shifts grow more unpredictable, corporate legal departments are stepping up their role in risk management — even as many feel they’re navigating in the dark. Their top concern? A surge in new — and often conflicting — regulations spanning everything from consumer privacy and AI governance to tax and trade.

During times of increased market volatility, opportunities for short-term profit-taking become more prevalent. However, corporate insiders who trade in their company’s stock in such an environment may be subject to shareholder actions aimed at recovering any short-term profits they earn.

One defense that foreign courts have given substantial weight when evaluating a request for extradition to the United States is the risk of inhumane or unfair treatment, including the denial of substantive or procedural rights, as well as the conditions and length of punishment an extradited person faces if convicted. The administration’s resistance to complying with federal court orders taking the contrary view may provide further support.

On June 9, the DOJ released its Guidelines for Investigations and Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, ending a months-long pause on FCPA enforcement and outlining DOJ’s go-forward criteria for evaluating whether to bring FCPA actions. Here’s a breakdown of the key themes in the guidelines.

On May 22, 2025, the Supreme Court endorsed the “fraudulent inducement” theory of wire fraud in Kousisis v. United States, departing from its recent trend of narrowing the scope of broadly worded criminal statutes, including the wire fraud statute. This decision appears to allow the government to obtain a conviction even where the defendant did not intend to cause economic harm to their counterparty, so long as the defendant made material false statements in order to obtain property from another.

In the annals of corporate fraud, few stories resonate as powerfully as that of Theranos, the Silicon Valley biotech startup that promised to revolutionize blood testing but collapsed under the weight of its own deception. At the heart of this saga is Tyler Shultz, a young whistleblower. This article recounts Tyler’s extraordinary journey and invites legal professionals to explore its lessons through our CLE program, which bridges his real-world experience with the ethical obligations enshrined in the Rules of Professional Conduct.

On April 8, 2025, a California jury found that R.C. Bigelow, Inc., the well-known manufacturer of Bigelow teas, intentionally or recklessly misled consumers by claiming that some of its teabags were “Manufactured in the USA.” The price for this mislabeling was steep, with the jury awarding the class action plaintiffs $2.36 million.