Dream Team

With a subprime mortgage lending crisis in full swing, Martha Stewart fresh from the slammer and Enron a not-so-distant memory, you might start to think we're in the middle of the white-collar crime era. Cleveland-based law firm McDonald Hopkins agrees. This fall, the firm launched its new White Collar Crime, Antitrust and Securities Litigation Practice Group, a dream team of top talent with an incredible range of legal expertise and trial experience.

"What separates our group is the breadth of our experience," says Group Chair Ned Searby, whose all-star legal team includes two former federal prosecutors, a Federal Communications Commission enforcement lawyer, a former FBI agent who investigated fraud, an attorney who covered FTC trade issues and three former state prosecutors.

The group's eight attorneys work from McDonald Hopkins' offices across the country on both civil and criminal matters.

"We tend to operate a lot at the intersection of criminal and civil litigation," Searby says. "Sometimes we're representing a company that is subject to a criminal investigation, but also we are very mindful of the potential for civil litigation."

Searby and his longtime collaborator Mark Jackowski anchor the group. The pair first worked together when Searby assisted Jackowski in the case against the nationally publicized Bank of Credit and Commerce International's multibillion-dollar drug money laundering scandal in 1989 while Searby was still a law student.

As a federal prosecutor in Florida, Searby convicted drug dealers and mafia members, and later, in private practice, he was involved in the $75 million ImClone Systems settlement. Jackowski's federal prosecutions include convictions that led to the indictment of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. He was also involved with Searby in the Independent Counsels in Washington, D.C.

The team's expertise in corporate crime is already being put to good use. Although he's mum on the details, Searby says the group is hard at work on a number of national cases.