Mayer Brown Lands DOJ FCPA Assistant Chief

Mayer Brown has recruited Sonali Patel, a former assistant chief of the Department of Justice’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit, marking the latest Big Law hire from the DOJ this year.

Patel has joined Mayer Brown as a partner in its global investigations and white-collar defense practice, residing out of the Washington, D.C., office.

“I did reach a point where a lot of my cases were sort of wrapping up, and I had to think about what I wanted to do next, and it felt like a good time to see if there was the right opportunity in the private sector,” Patel said in an interview on her move.

As assistant chief of the FCPA unit for the past three years, Patel oversaw the investigation and prosecution of FCPA and related white-collar cases involving corporations and individuals.
Patel led more than 50 FCPA-related investigations during her time at the DOJ, including the agency’s PDVSA cases, where 29 defendants were charged in an international money-laundering scheme involving bribes made to Venezuela’s state-owned energy company, Petróleos de Venezuela.

“During my time in the DOJ, the department as a whole sort of ramped up corporate enforcement. The FCPA unit has been doing that for years and years, but during my time there, the department really focused on creating corporate enforcement policies for various divisions within the government that had not been doing that before,” Patel added.

Last year, the DOJ made revisions to its criminal division’s corporate enforcement and voluntary self-disclosure policy, which sought to encourage more corporate self-reporting of potential criminal wrongdoing. Partly in response, law firms have seen a boom in enforcement work across the board and some have staffed up in various practices to meet demand.

Before being appointed as assistant chief of the FCPA unit, Sonali served as a trial attorney within the FCPA unit and was previously a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia.

Andrew Olmem, managing partner of Mayer Brown’s Washington, D.C., office, said in a statement that high-profile enforcement and litigation work is a “core focus” of the office.

Another former assistant chief of the FCPA unit, Gerald Moody, joined Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld as a partner earlier this summer.

In addition to Moody and Patel, several other lawyers have left the DOJ in recent months. For instance, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom brought on James Fredricks, most recently chief of the Washington criminal II section of the DOJ’s antitrust division, as a partner. Foley & Lardner hired Mark Grundvig as a partner from the DOJ, where he most recently served as assistant chief in the Washington criminal II section of the DOJ’s antitrust division.

Reprinted with permission from the September 4th edition of National Law Journal © 2024 ALM Properties, Inc. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited.