The NACDL White-Collar Conference Is Coming (And Why You Should Be Excited About That)

There are differences between the NACDL and ABA conferences, and they illuminate a good deal about the differences in the white-collar bar....

November 6-8, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers is having its annual White Collar Criminal Defense Conference. If you’re interested in learning about the white-collar bar, you should go (also, in the interests of full disclosure, one of my partners is speaking at it).

The white-collar world has two main conferences. There’s the NACDL White-Collar conference in November — which is sometimes affectionately called the Abbe Lowell conference, since he has been the driving force behind much of it — and the ABA White-Collar conference in the Spring. Normally, the NACDL conference is in Washington, D.C. or New York, and the ABA Conference is some place southern, pleasant, and known for alcohol consumption (Miami last year, New Orleans this year, Vegas a few years ago).

There are differences between the conferences, and they illuminate a good deal about the differences in the white-collar bar….

The NACDL conference is explicitly a conference for and by defense lawyers. Prosecutors aren’t welcome. In fact, prosecutors are so not welcome that when you sign up, you have to click a box certifying that you aren’t a prosecutor and that if you see a prosecutor on the street you’ll try to sneeze on her shirt.

As the NACDL’s description of the conference says:

Designed by defense attorneys for defense attorneys, NACDL’s Defending the White Collar Case Seminar is the nation’s premiere white collar CLE. This year’s program will examine the biggest developments and hottest topics in white collar law such as cybercrime, public corruption, and forfeiture. It will also offer critical trial skill-building techniques and will offer strategies for combatting prosecutorial gamesmanship. Attendees will exchange ideas over networking lunches and have the chance to participate in a defense-minded Town Hall that will close out the program. And, as always, this unique program will provide the defense bar an open and receptive forum to share our experiences with each other.

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This conference is, really, the premier strategy session for folks who represent actual individuals in actual indicted white-collar cases and are trying really hard to keep them out of actual prisons.

The agenda looks amazing — Hank Asbill talking about defending public corruption cases, Paula Junghans talking about forfeiture, and Chief Judge Alex Kozinski talking about whatever he wants to talk about. It should be a rocking good time.

By contrast, the ABA conference reveals another side of the white-collar bar. Here’s the description of last year’s conference:

Over the past twenty-seven years, the Institute has been attended by leading federal and state judges and prosecutors, law enforcement officials, defense attorneys, corporate in-house counsel and members of the academic community. The faculty regularly includes some of the top members of the white collar bar in the United States and abroad. Among the audience are nationally-renowned lawyers, as well as many who are beginning to concentrate in the white collar area.

The ABA conference is a good way to meet — and drink — with a varied cross-section of the white-collar bar. And, sociologically, it’s a good way to immerse oneself in this corner of the law. And, I don’t know if I mentioned it, but it’s a really fun conference.

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That said, one of the biggest tensions I see in white-collar criminal work rotates around what kinds of clients are involved and how much the defense lawyers see the government as the enemy. Some of us who do this work — myself included — think that the presence of a robust criminal defense bar, white-collar or not, is essential to the functioning of a civil society. It is bad to put people in prison. It’s a moral outrage to let government power run unchecked. NACDL’s tagline is “Liberty’s Last Champion.” Most of the folks at the NACDL conference take that seriously.

Other folks in the white-collar bar, generally those who tend to represent exclusively large corporations, tend to think that white-collar criminal defense work is good, and that it’s often lucrative if you have the right clients, and that it presents well at a cocktail party. Corporations and business people have to navigate complex regulatory environments, and they need lawyers to help with that work.

The NACDL conference is for the first kind of person. The ABA conference is for the second kind of person. Generally, most of the folks who are the first kind of person are also the second kind of person; thus, most of the folks at the NACDL conference also go to the ABA conference.

But, for those of us who sometimes prefer a less genteel approach to the representation of people caught up in the criminal justice system, the NACDL conference is there for us.


Matt Kaiser is a partner at The Kaiser Law Firm PLLC, a boutique litigation firm in Washington DC, which handles government investigations, white-collar criminal cases, federal criminal appeals, and complex civil litigation. You can reach him by email at mattkaiser@thekaiserlawfirm, and you can follow him on Twitter: @mattkaiser.