It’s rare for a corporation or an individual facing a criminal antitrust prosecution to take the Justice Department to trial.

It’s even more rare to go to trial and win.

But increasingly it’s happening.

And Patrick Robbins has taken the Department to trial twice over the last two years. And both cases resulted in an acquittal for his clients.

Robbins is a partner with Shearman & Sterling in San Francisco, California.

Robbins recently represented two executives in the AU Optronics criminal prosecution. In that case, the Justice Department charged the company and six individual executives with criminal price fixing.

The company and the executives took the Justice Department to trial. Three individuals were acquitted — including both of Robbins’ clients. The company and three executives were convicted.

How did that happen — three acquitted and three convicted?

“I don’t think you can generalize,” Robbins told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “The evidence was different as to each of them. About the most recent trial, the Department of Justice took the position that our client attended meetings with competitors on more than one occasion and that that was enough to indicate that he had criminal culpability. And the jury disagreed.”

“Our defense largely revolved around the idea that during the period he was supposedly fixing prices, he was growing his market share — and he was deceiving his competitors, not colluding with them.”

“Because the penalties are pretty severe, more and more individuals who are charged are deciding to go to trial. And that’s when you see what a jury thinks the evidence is. The lesson from the AUO case is that they reached a little too far into the ranks and relied on what they think is clear evidence of criminal collusion over prices but which juries disagree with pretty vehemently.”

Why are more individuals going to trial?

“You saw that first in the securities context, which became more criminalized about ten years ago,” Robbins said. “You see it in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) context, where in the last two years, many individuals have decided to go to trial and many of them have prevailed. And now you are seeing it in the antitrust context.”

“And it’s just a function of the fact that the Department of Justice has these very activist programs to seek deterrence in these three areas — securities, antitrust and FCPA. They can do that with companies and companies will generally plead guilty because they are not going to put their futures on the line. But the Department wants to send the message that individuals will go to prison if they commit these offenses. So, they are indicting more individuals. More individuals are going to trial. And the record has been mixed over the last two to three years.”

We asked Robbins — how does West Coast white collar criminal defense differ from the East Coast practice?

“When I think of East Coast white collar practice I think of Boston, New York and Washington. Washington has a strong regulatory and antitrust white collar practice,” Robbins said. “In New York, there is everything. Boston is well known for the health care white collar practice.”

“On the West Coast, the Bay Area has everything. You have the valley, which is corporate based. You have aggressive regulators, some of the best and most active antitrust enforcers in the San Francisco office. They have brought the vast majority of the major cartel cases in the United States over the last ten years. You have a very experienced SEC regional office that does everything from insider trading to accounting fraud. And you have a U.S. Attorney’s office that has brought marquee cases in the white collar area.”

“The great thing about the West Coast practice is that you get to live here and you get the high quality practice that you see in New York and Washington, D.C.”

So for a white collar defense lawyer, it doesn’t matter whether you sit in New York or San Francisco or DC?

It does and it doesn’t, Robbins says.

“Effective representation of a company or an individual often depends on the lawyer’s relationship and reputation in a particular office,” Robbins said. “There is a network of former Assistant U.S. Attorneys here in San Francisco who are very effective in dealing with the office, not just in going in an pleading individuals, but negotiating non prosecution agreements, persuading prosecutors to drop investigations. That background is invaluable for a prosecutor. And it’s not necessarily something you can pick up and use to the same effect in another district. In that sense, geography is important.”

“But most of the large AmLaw 50 firms are global. The work we do in the white collar area in the investigative phase involves internal investigations, representations of individuals outside the United States. In that context, where you sit isn’t nearly as important as the resources that your bring. Because of my firm and its reach, when a matter comes up in Asia, I have the ability to deploy lawyers and investigators in the relevant country who speak the language, who understand the documents, the company and the culture. And I am able to do that and my colleagues at Shearman are able to do that from anywhere in the world, taking advantage of the resources that we have. So, in that sense, in conducting internal investigations, it doesn’t matter where you sit. It’s your team and resources that matter.”

[For the complete transcript of the q/a format Interview with Patrick Robbins, see page 27 Corporate Crime Reporter 42(12), November 4, 2013, print edition only.]