Federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against 20 hedge fund managers, traders, corporate executives, and at least two lawyers in connection with the US Government's crackdown on insider trading, writes The American Laywer.

Arthur Cutillo, an intellectual property litigation associate in the New York office of Ropes & Gray, is one of the individuals charged in the scheme.

According to a criminal complaint filed against seven of those charged, the 33-year-old Cutillo is alleged to have provided inside information on three transactions on which Ropes advised private equity clients: TPG and Silver Lake's $8.2bn (£4.9bn) acquisition of Avaya in June 2007, TPG's $1.3bn (£780m) acquisition of Axcan Pharma in November 2007, and Bain Capital's $2.2bn (£1.3bn) acquisition of 3Com in September of that year.

Ropes is known for its strong private equity practice and has advised Bain and TPG on several high-profile deals, including a $17.9bn (£10.8bn) buyout of radio giant Clear Channel and $28.1bn (£16.9bn) sale of Alltel to Verizon last year.

In a statement, a Ropes spokesman said: "We are deeply disappointed about this situation, which suggests an extreme breach of this person's duty of trust to our clients and to the firm. We cannot comment in detail on an ongoing investigation but we are moving quickly to protect our clients and are co-operating fully with authorities." Cutillo's CV has been removed from the firm's website.

"It certainly sounds like this [probe] is widening," says Bradley Simon, a former federal prosecutor and founder of New York's Simon & Partners. "While it is still unclear at this point how far and wide this permeates, if it involves a lawyer at a large firm there's no telling how far this will go. It's almost like a virus."

Another individual arrested in the investigation, Michael Kimelman, a trader and founding partner of Incremental Capital, previously worked as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell.

According to a civil complaint filed by the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) against Cutillo and six other defendants on Thursday (5 November), a third defendant, 31-year-old Jason Goldfarb, is a private practice lawyer in New York. New York State Bar Association records show only one lawyer with that name in private practice in Brooklyn – an associate at personal injury firm Brecher Fishman Pasternack Walsh Tilker & Ziegler.

The SEC complaint was the second such complaint filed on Thursday relating to insider trading. An amended civil complaint was also filed in the case against the Galleon Group hedge fund and its billionaire founder Raj Rajaratnam, charging alleged government informant Roomy Khan and 12 additional individuals and entities with participating in a $33m (£20m) insider trading scheme.

The two SEC complaints are separate but involve some individual overlap. Three individuals and one entity – employees of New York trading firm the Schottenfeld Group – charged in the amended Galleon complaint are also named in the Cutillo complaint. Sources familiar with the Government's investigation say that while some of the individuals are the same, the alleged schemes themselves differed.

The SEC case in the Cutillo matter is being handled by lawyers in Washington DC, while the regulatory body's New York regional office is overseeing the Galleon case.

Prosecutors claim that Cutillo was the focal point of an insider trading scheme that generated $53m (£32m) in illegal profits.

Both Cutillo and Goldfarb made appearances on Thursday before US magistrate judge Theodore Katz in Manhattan. Cutillo was represented by Bryan Blaney of Norris McLaughlin & Marcus in New York, while Goldfarb turned to Harvey Greenberg of New York's Greenberg & Wilner.

The use of wiretaps on individuals suspected of committing white-collar crimes continued to surprise some defence lawyers.

"Wiretaps are not frequently used because they are expensive, difficult to obtain, and time-intensive in terms of manpower and resources," says Michael Gurland, a former federal prosecutor and assistant district attorney in Manhattan who now co-chairs the white-collar defence group at Chicago's Neal Gerber & Eisenberg. "We usually see them being used in major drug and gang-related investigations, not insider-trading cases that are usually built on an inference of guilt from circumstantial evidence like banking, trading, and phone records."

Manhattan assistant US attorneys Andrew Fish, Reed Brodsky, and Marc Litt are handling the Cutillo case for the Government.

The American Lawyer is a US sister title of Legal Week.