The National Law Journal, Law360, Bloomberg Law, Global Investigations Review and The Washington Post were among the media outlets covering the arrival of Washington, D.C., Ben O’Neil, who joined McGuireWoods’ Government Investigations & White Collar Litigation Department on Feb. 28, 2022.
O’Neil is an accomplished trial lawyer and former federal prosecutor with significant experience in international anti-corruption matters. In a March 1 story in The National Law Journal, he said his move to McGuireWoods enables him to continue his cross-border work at a firm that wants to grow in that area.
“The way the global economy and enforcement priorities work right now, every significant white-collar matter now has a cross-border element. Having experienced the difficulties with big, cross-border cases — from logistical, to coordinating investigations in multiple jurisdictions and the political side, I think my background and experience is particularly useful to clients,” O’Neil said.
O’Neil was a trial attorney in the Justice Department’s criminal division fraud section from 2010 to 2013, managing investigations and prosecutions of healthcare and securities fraud, as well as FCPA violations. He told Law360 that his DOJ experience was “some of the most formative in my career.”
“I learned not only how complex corporate fraud cases can be, but also that at their core they are fundamentally about human beings making decisions,” he said. “Often we see corporate entities as faceless behemoths and forget that they can’t act except through the people that work there. So when you would drill down as a prosecutor into these large matters, it always struck me that at bottom the case came down to the action or inaction of a small handful of people.”
In an interview with GIR, O’Neil discussed his experiences handling high-profile cases in Latin America and how those probes differ from investigations in the United States.
“Things move quickly, things are pretty public and they leak regularly,” he said.