Christopher J. Clark has left troubled Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP for Latham & Watkins LLP, where he is a partner in the litigation division of its New York office.
Christopher J. Clark, partner
Clark, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, will be part of Latham’s white collar practice and investigations group. Clark was previously head of the white collar criminal defense and regulatory investigative practice group at Dewey, where he served as counsel in a number of high-profile cases, including the dismissed SEC lawsuit against Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks.
The SEC alleged that Cuban had committed insider trading by selling his stock on Mamma.com based on confidential information given to him by the company’s CEO. Clark, along with Cuban’s other lawyer at Dewey, Ralph Ferrara, argued there was no such confidentiality agreement. The suit was dismissed in July 2009.
As a federal prosecutor 1999 to 2005, Clark conducted nine federal criminal trials as lead or co-lead counsel. He prosecuted top officers of Adelphia Communications Inc., who were convicted of 18 felony counts each for fraud and conspiracy. Clark argued that CEO John Rigas and his son, CFO Timothy Rigas, stole $100 million from the company, hid $2.3 billion of the company’s debt and lied about Adelphia’s financial conditions to its investors.
At Latham, Clark rejoins former colleague Richard Owens, with whom he worked as a Assistant U.S. Attorney in the early 2000s. Owens served as an AUSA in the Southern District of New York from 1994 to 2006. Owens “was my chief at the U.S. Attorney’s office, and he taught me literally everything I know about white-collar crime,” Clark told the Wall Street Journal.
He received his law degree from Columbia Law School in 1996 and his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1993.
