Friday, November 6, 2009
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Ex-Assistant U.S. Attorney Emmick Joins Sheppard Mullin
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Former assistant U.S. Attorney Michael W. Emmick has joined the downtown Los Angeles office of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP as special counsel, the firm said yesterday.
Emmick will be working in the firm’s Government Contracts and Regulated Industries, and White Collar and Civil Fraud Defense practice groups.
He served as an assistant U.S. attorney for 25 years in Los Angeles, where he handled over 35 criminal trials, chiefly in the white collar arena, spent eight years as chief of the 30-attorney Public Corruption and Government Fraud Section, and seven years as special counsel to the U.S. attorney, the firm said.
From 1997 to 2000, Emmick was detailed to the Office of Independent Counsel in Washington, D.C., where he worked on the investigation of then-President Bill Clinton regarding the Monica Lewinsky scandal, first as associate independent counsel and then as deputy independent counsel.
Other notable cases that the attorney has been involved with include the real-estate fraud prosecution of former Arizona Gov. Fife Symington in the District of Arizona; the espionage-related prosecution of suspected Chinese double-agent Katrina Leung; the class-action securities-fraud kickback investigation of the Milberg Weiss law firm; and investigations of various congressmen and other elected officials suspected of bribery, conflicts of interest, and election crimes.
In the 1990’s, Emmick spearheaded the prosecutive efforts—and related False Claims Act litigation—against numerous defense and aerospace contractors, and he later worked in cooperation with that industry through the Department of Justice’s Government-Aerospace-Industry Working Group re Reciprocal Cooperation and Parallel Proceedings Working Group, the firm added.
Emmick was a member of the trial team that received DOJ’s second highest award, the Attorney General’s Award for Distinguished Service, for the 2006 prosecution of the leaders of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang.
He also received DOJ’s Director’s Award, Special Commendation for Outstanding Service; the Anti-Defamation League’s Sherwood Prize for Combating Hate Crimes; two DOJ Special Achievement Awards; and numerous other commendations.
Since 1986 he has served as an adjunct professor at four Los Angeles law schools—USC, Loyola, Southwestern and Pepperdine—where he taught White Collar Crime, Federal Criminal Law, Trial Advocacy, Advanced Trial Advocacy, Anti-Corruption Methods, Evidence and Advanced Criminal Procedure.
He has also taught at the National Institute for Trial Advocacy and the Hastings Center for Trial and Appellate Advocacy.
After leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2007, Emmick served as a distinguished practitioner in residence at Pepperdine Law School and Loyola Law School. During that time, he also worked as a white collar defense lawyer, representing various clients including a witness in the corruption prosecution of Orange County Sheriff Michael Carona, a defendant in a federal telemarketing fraud case,and a multi-national company being investigated for suspected commercial bribery.
Emmick has served as Vice-Chair of the American Bar Association’s West Coast White Collar Crime Committee and spent six years on the Judicial Appointments Committee of the Los Angeles County Bar Association.
The attorney was a member of the Core Organizing Committee of the Public/Private Partnership for Justice Reform in Afghanistan where he spent three months training lawyers, judges and legislators in the Republic of Georgia on behalf of the DOJ, and has conducted DOJ training programs for regional and country representatives in Jamaica, France, Moldova and Russia.
He is currently working as a consultant to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crimes, preparing a “toolkit” of techniques for addressing organized crime and corruption.
Emmick received a B.A. in 1974 from UC Santa Barbara, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude. He then attended UCLA Law School where he was comment editor on Law Review and did an extern-clerkship with then-California Supreme Court Justice Frank Richardson, since deceased.
Upon graduating Order of the Coif in 1978, Emmick became a judicial clerk to Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Ellsworth A. VanGraafeiland III
The attorney is the sixth to join Sheppard Mullin this week, following a group of five former Allen Matkins attorneys—Jerold B. Neuman, Michael J. Kiely, Alfred Fraijo Jr., Claudia Gutiérrez and Phillip M. Tate—who joined the firm’s Real Estate, Land Use and Environmental practice group.
Copyright 2009, Metropolitan News Company