Lawrence Gerschwer's practice focuses primarily on white-collar criminal and regulatory matters, including government investigations of securities, commodities, and government fraud, and of public corruption, both domestic and under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
Mr. Gerschwer has extensive experience in parallel proceedings and frequently defends clients in investigations and enforcement actions conducted by the DOJ, SEC, CFTC, IRS, and banking regulators, including federal and state criminal investigations, and related civil litigation. Mr. Gerschwer has also assisted numerous clients in cross-border investigations conducted by U.S. criminal prosecutors and regulators.
Prior to joining the firm in 2007, Mr. Gerschwer served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York for almost nine years, where he was a member of the Securities and Commodities Fraud Unit and the Public Corruption Unit.
As a federal prosecutor, Mr. Gerschwer tried a wide variety of criminal cases and argued numerous appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. His noteworthy prosecutions included cases related to the massive accounting fraud schemes at Adelphia Communications and at U.S. Foodservice, a U.S.-based subsidiary of the Dutch holding company, Royal Ahold, both of which involved parallel SEC investigations. Mr. Gerschwer also prosecuted cases involving fraud in the foreign exchange (forex) market that involved parallel CFTC investigations and a court-appointed receiver.
In the public corruption arena, Mr. Gerschwer investigated and prosecuted numerous defendants for their participation in a massive municipal corruption scheme to bribe New York City property tax assessors. The scheme, which resulted in charges of RICO, mail fraud, wire fraud, and bribery, was described by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg as "the largest and most financially damaging corruption scheme ever conducted within city government."
Before joining the U.S. Attorney's office in 1998, Mr. Gerschwer spent four years as a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen Katz. He also served as a law clerk to the Honorable Wilfred Feinberg, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, from 1993-1994.
Mr. Gerschwer was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society at SUNY Binghamton. At Columbia Law School, he was a Harlan Fiske Stone scholar, received the Alfred Forsythe Award, and served as a senior editor of the Columbia Law Review.