Ryan McConnell has spent time at some pretty big corporate criminal defense firms – Shearman & Sterling, Baker Botts, Haynes & Boone, Morgan Lewis, Baker & McKenzie.
But for more than a decade now, he’s been with his own firm – R. McConnell Group.
Ryan is a former federal prosecutor who has tried nearly twenty federal jury trials and conducted hundreds of investigations.
He recently served as lead trial counsel in U.S. v. Rovirosa, a federal criminal prosecution brought by the Department of Justice under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
The case was the first FCPA case tried post-Trump and one of only a small number of FCPA cases ever tried to verdict.
Ryan has long been active in legal education. He is a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, where he teaches corporate compliance and governance, and has previously taught criminal procedure and national security law.
Do you have a sense as to how many white collar criminal lawyers in America are with small firms as compared to big firms?
“It may vary by market,” McConnell told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “Maybe in New York, the bigger names are working at the bigger firms. In Houston, that’s not necessarily true. You see a lot of the big named criminal defense attorneys – Rusty Hardin, Dan Cogdell – have their own boutique firms and are not with big firms.”
“One of the things we were able to do successfully to level the playing field is use Artificial Intelligence. Over the long term, that is going to be a huge differentiator. In the Rovirosa case, the government dumped millions of records on us. We were able to successfully use AI tools to go through those records and pull out what was important. We set up a shared work space. And the AI tools knew our case.”
“That will be a huge benefit for boutique and smaller white collar firms. And that might take some of the advantage away from working in a big firm. We could not have done the case without the benefit of AI.”
What is the practice of your firm?
“My practice today is not what it was in 2013. In 2013, my primary client was Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart at the time had hired Jay Jorgensen and Daniel Trujillo to build up the global compliance program. I had met Daniel when I was working with another company – Schlumberger – at Morgan Lewis. Those guys took a chance on me and gave me a lot of work for Wal-Mart. And that was my practice for about seven years – doing compliance and governance work for Wal-Mart. That was different from what I had been doing at Morgan Lewis and Baker McKenzie and Haynes & Boone. I had been doing litigation, I had been doing white collar criminal defense.”
“But all of that Wal-Mart work went away in 2020 or so. That was about 70 to 80 percent of my practice. It was hugely disruptive and scary when it went away. I had to reset my firm. And then Matthew Boyden, who is probably one of the best investigators I have ever worked with – he was leaving the government and he came to my firm. And we did a hard reset. We said – we are going to keep doing some of the governance and compliance work we had been doing, but we are also going to do criminal defense and litigation. We had more of a country law firm feel, but based in a city.”
“We did all kinds of work for all kinds of clients – big and small, kept the governance clients, we do a lot of work for different boards and general counsel in the governance space, we do litigation for big companies. We do criminal defense work. We just did the Roviroso trial. And we do a lot of civil litigation for high net worth individuals. In those cases, we’ll handle the entire case. But usually on larger cases, we have some piece of the case.”
“Today we have a very balanced and well rounded practice, something that took twelve years to get to.”
How does the practice differ from being in a big firm?
“The first thing is we have fewer conflicts. I found myself not really suited for the big firm. I like to move quickly on business development. I like to work independently. I usually have strong ideas about business development and things I would like to do. You have a lot more independence working for yourself. I had tricked myself into thinking that big firms provided security in terms of work and stability for clients. One problem that all white collar lawyers have is that the cases are mostly one offs. That’s kind of why we started doing the governance practice to have some stability.”
“But if we do an investigation, it’s not likely that that company is going to have another investigation to give immediately after the one we just finished. At big firms, you tend to think you will get a lot of referral work and I’ll always have that referral work. That didn’t pan out for me, but it’s probably different from firm to firm. You have a lot more independence at the smaller firm. When things are slower, it’s not as scary because you don’t have all of the overhead and costs that the large firms have. The big firms don’t necessarily provide the kind of security that you think they would.”
From 2012 to 2019, you rode the seven year government FCPA investigation of Wal-Mart.
“It was a very successful time for the firm.”
That case was resolved in June 2019. Can you give us some insight into the investigation and resulting settlement.
“I think Jones Day and another firm was handling the investigation. Our work was ancillary to the investigation. Our work was mostly in the compliance and the governance space. They had Greenberg Traurig working on the anti-corruption side and we did everything else. We helped a little bit with the anti-corruption piece. Our role was compliance and governance. We didn’t get into the weeds of the investigation and settlement.”
“One thing I learned early on in having my own firm – big firms are not your competition. Someone is not cross shopping me with Gibson Dunn. And the way to work successfully with their firms is to not go into their lanes. Wal-Mart was a good example. I did the work they asked me to do. I did my work and tried to do the best work I could do for my client in the work I was doing.”
“And Wal-Mart built a world class compliance program. Daniel Trujillo and Jay Jorgensen were masters at this. They did it better and bigger and more thoughtful than anyone else. At the time, a lot of people were talking about how to use data and integrate data into compliance. These guys basically invented it. They came up with this management system tool. And they came up with a lot of devices and initiatives that companies are using now.
Jorgensen and Trujillo laid the groundwork for all of this. They were the center of it. Those guys and the executives at Wal-Mart took it seriously. And I think that’s why the settlement resolved itself the way it did.”
It’s very difficult to measure rates of crime. There is really no way to say that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) has deterred foreign bribery or the settlement with Wal-Mart deterred bribery by Wal-Mart.
“That’s an important point. We figured out early on – it’s hard to predict where your next problem is going to be. You can track which countries have certain FCPA problems. And you can look at the Foreign Corruption Perception Index and where you think cases are more likely to occur. But really there is no predictability as to where your next case will occur.”
“It’s very difficult to project where your next case is going to be. For white collar lawyers, we never know where our next case is coming from. We have the same problems companies do. From a company perspective, they ask – how do we know our compliance program is working to prevent these kinds of problems?”
“You try to look at performance indicators to see if your governance program is working. In the bribery space, you may look at how many allegations you get. Do you have audit results that are out of sync? You look for indicators of problems. When you have a Wal-Mart settlement or a big False Claims Act settlement, you hope that those indicators go down after that settlement and you hope that governance you put in place improves the reliability of those indicators and the predictiveness of those indicators. You hope you get smarter and better at what kinds of things show you smoke where there could be fire.”
“But you are right, it’s impossible to know where your next case is coming from or if your program is working or if one case deters future conduct. Those things are difficult to quantify.”
What part of your practice is governance and compliance versus investigations?
“I would say probably forty percent is governance. It’s mostly investigations and litigation. It didn’t used to be that way. The pure compliance work has gone down about fifteen percent a year over the last five years. That’s my practice.”
Why is that?
“Two reasons. Companies invested a lot more internal resources in doing things themselves. You see companies hiring compliance people. The practice has changed to my reviewing things, giving my gut check on a company than actually doing the work for them. They now have the internal resources to do that themselves.”
“The second reason – we have seen in just this year, I have seen a huge shift away from enforcement with this new administration. Those types of cases are just not a significant priority for the administration. They are looking at immigration, cartels and drugs.”
“You can say – well, that is what they were elected to do. But the impact to the white collar practice is that the work has slowed down. And when there is less enforcement, companies tend to allocate fewer resources to those types of projects.”
How has the practice changed under this administration?
“We have seen a slowdown in the pure compliance space. Governance is still strong in terms of what the boards are doing. Enforcement has been dropping off for the last few years anyway, but maybe we have seen an acceleration this year.”
“When I talk about governance, I’m talking about advising boards on legal issues, helping them come up with strategic priorities, helping them evaluate strategic risk. And that has been interesting and changing given all of the executive orders. Boards are keen to know the hot areas. General counsel will call us asking about these risks from this executive order or that order. We are seeing a lot of that occur.”
“In specific subject matter areas, we see more of a focus on immigration. We have clients call us with immigration issues. Going back to when I was at the Department of Justice, there were these worksite enforcement cases in Houston and all over the country. You had the Tyson case, you had big cases for worksite enforcement. Then during the first Trump administration, all of that drops off. Didn’t see a lot of it for a while, but now we are seeing it coming back. We saw the crackdown on the Hyundai plant. We’ve had some clients ask us about worksite enforcement actions.”
“The FCPA work has gone down because of the focus on transnational criminal organizations and cartel type work.”
What part of your practice is individual versus corporate?
“In the criminal context, it’s hard to find individuals who are not indemnified who can afford our rates. Those cases are few and far between. And it’s difficult to determine what part of the practice is individual versus corporate. We’ll get an individual with the resources as a client and all of a sudden those cases can consume a huge part of our practice. But the good cases are few and far between. Individual cases like that – we’ll get good ones once or twice every two or three years.”
“Most of the individual work that we do is indemnified work. And that’s probably ten to fifteen percent of our practice. I like representing individuals. It’s very satisfying. I like fighting the government in court and standing up for individual constitutional rights. It’s like why we all went to law school – to have that kind of case. But it’s hard to find the right cases, the right facts, with people who can afford it. At the end of the day, we are all doing this to pay the rent.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Ryan McConnell, see 40 Corporate Crime Reporter 2(12), January 12, 2026, print edition only.]