CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Kelley
Drye’s Barry Pollack, Enron, and Getting it Done at Trial
21 Corporate Crime Reporter 26, June 22, 20076
Most white collar crime defense lawyers represent both corporations and individuals.
But most also have a preference.
Some white collar crime defense lawyers prefer representing corporations.
Others prefer representing individuals.
Put Barry Pollack in the second category.
Pollack is a partner with Kelley Drye in Washington, D.C.
“I have represented my share of corporations,” Pollack told Corporate Crime Reporter this week. “But my practice has been weighted more heavily toward representing individuals. And I enjoy representing individuals. When you are representing an individual, you are talking about an actual person who has a family, who has a life that is going to be dramatically impacted by what happens in this case. It is not what kind of a check they are going to write to which government agency. It is whether or not they are going to prison and whether they are going to be able to go on and lead their life. So, you see a much more immediate and dramatic impact of the work that you are doing. And I’ve always enjoyed that aspect of the practice.”
Most recently, Pollack represented two Enron defendants.
For one, he negotiated a non-prosecution agreement and that case stayed out of the media limelight.
For the second, he went to trial twice. At the first trial, the jury hung, and at the second, his client was acquitted on all counts.
Pollack cut his teeth doing white collar criminal defense at the federal public defender’s office in Maryland.
“Spending three years in the federal public defender’s office, I probably got the same kind of trial experience that it would have taken another fifteen to twenty years in private practice to acquire,” Pollack said. “And I was no longer the second chair in a trial where a more experienced attorney would be taking the lead. I was now lead counsel in federal criminal jury trials and was lead counsel routinely. I was able to build a skill set as a trial lawyer much more rapidly than I could have had I stayed exclusively in private practice.”
White collar prosecutions often drive business people into bankruptcy, and they end up at the public defender looking for representation.
“It was a very diverse caseload,” Pollack said. “And many of the cases were much more similar to the cases that you might have in private practice than you might think. I did any number of cases involving real estate fraud, the investment industry. I represented CPAs. I represented physicians.”
“These kinds of complex white collar investigations will literally bankrupt a person – somebody who may have had substantial means at one point may have been through civil litigation, may have been represented by counsel pre-indictment, may have been indicted and had what assets they had remaining frozen by the government under the forfeiture laws. And so, people who may have been of some means at some point are now faced with a situation where they qualify for court appointed counsel and need to be represented at a high level and in a complex federal criminal trial.”
[For a complete transcript of the Interview with Barry Pollack, see 21 Corporate Crime Reporter 26(10), June 25, 2007, print edition only.]
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