Gordon Greenberg
Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton
Specialty: White-collar crime
Law School: Chicago Kent College of Law, 1980
As a federal prosecutor in L.A., Gordon Greenberg won the conviction in 1988 of Barry Minkow in the ZZZZ Best carpet-cleaning scam, one of the largest fraud cases ever tried on the West Coast.
Now in private practice, Greenberg is involved in another major investor fraud case. He represents Edward Chermay, former president of IDB/Worldcom, who is charged in federal court with insider trading and misstating his company’s earnings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The case is scheduled to go to trial in June.
Greenberg also represents law firms that worked for white-collar criminals at the time they were breaking the law. The head of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton’s business crimes practice group, Greenberg tries to keep those cases out of court by convincing prosecutors that his lawyer clients were not in cahoots with white-collar criminals.
A case he handled in 1997 involved a law firm in Arizona that represented Fife Symington, former governor of that state. Though Symington was convicted of bank fraud, Greenberg got his law firm off the hook.
Greenberg, now 44, began his law career as a district attorney in Chicago. His Belgian girlfriend at the time wanted to visit L.A., so Greenberg used the opportunity to drop off his resume at the U.S. Attorney’s Office here. Before long, he landed a job in the financial investigations unit.
In 1989, Greenberg was approached by Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton to start a white-collar crime department for the firm. Greenberg saw it as a natural evolution of his career. “I wanted a new challenge, and the transition was easier than I expected,” he says. “The folks that I represent aren’t really such desperados.”
Greenberg said his experience as a federal prosecutor was a tremendous asset. Why? Because now he knows what kind of evidence the government is looking for and what it takes to convince a prosecutor that it’s not there.
Edvard Pettersson
