Month: February 2020

A top assistant prosecutor at the Southern District of New York or Main Justice today makes around $150,000 a year. In 2016 the government scale topped out at $160,300. A top partner at a good firm can easily make $3 million to $4 million a year. In the meantime, the cost of living in the nation’s most coveted and powerful cities has skyrocketed. A prosecutor’s salary has become more difficult to live on, while in private practice a partner’s income has dramatically outpaced inflation.

During settlement negotiations, the prosecutors want to appear tough to the defense lawyers on the other side of the table. They want to dazzle them with their knowledge of legal precedent, mastery of details, and bargaining skills. But young prosecutors also want their adversaries to imagine them as future partners. They want to demonstrate that they are people of proportion.

Because sprawling corporation investigations are so complex and difficult, and because the defense is so robust and well funded, prosecutors fell in love with settlements. The prosecutorial saying “Big cases, big problems” has an addendum: “Little cases, little problems, and no cases, no problems.”

A symbiotic relationship developed between Big Law and the Department of Justice. The way government prosecuted corporate crime helped transform how private firms conducted their practice and their business. Big law firms in turn began to change how the government approached corporate investigations and prosecutions. The Department of Justice became a way station, a post-(law) doctorate course of study, a résumé builder for future partners at prestigious law firms.

The revolving door was not just a way for government employees to cash in. Both sides were changing the other–ultimately to the benefit of corporations. No one conceded, at least publicly, that the revolving door influenced the lawyers’ work in government.

K. Sabeel Raman, a scholar at Brooklyn Law School, writes:

Successive waves of liberal governance reform–from the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” initiative, to the Obama administration’s emphasis on cost-benefit analysis and transparency–share a common problem: they prioritize “good” government over “democratic” government. This liberal vision of governance reform does not address the root challenge raised by critics on both the left and right today: the fear that government is ineffective, unresponsive, or unduly influenced by business and economic elites.”

White-collar prosecutions suffered from not just a leadership vacuum but also a resource drain. During the years after 9/11, the Department of Justice took money and people away form white-collar investigations, and that shift continued through Gonzales’s tenure. The FBI transformed from a domestic investigative body to an international intelligence agency, focused primarily on terrorism.

Research suggests jurors make up their minds in the first moments of a trial and then interpret the remaining evidence in a way that confirms their initial impression.

Aggressive prosecutors, however, believe that the practice of firms underwriting legal fees is a form of hush money. Former deputy attorney general Larry Thompson told me, “If you sit there and think these corporations are paying for the employees’ choice of lawyer, and not sometimes simply to keep the employees quiet, then you believe in the tooth fairy.”