(Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM)

Kirkland & Ellis has brought back an alum who led a string of insider trading and securities fraud investigations at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, including the case against Rep. Chris Collins and former law firm partner Walter “Chet” Little.

Robert Allen, 34, joined Kirkland as a partner this month, representing clients in commercial and securities-related cases and in criminal and regulatory investigations. He spent four years in the Southern District office, including more than two years on the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force.

Allen, who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, was previously a Kirkland associate for nearly three years.

Among his most recent cases, Allen helped lead the investigation of Collins, charged last month with insider trading. Collins has pleaded not guilty.

Robert Allen. (Courtesy photo)

Allen also led the prosecution of Little, a former Foley & Lardner partner who was sentenced in February to 27 months in prison for conspiring to commit insider trading, and led the prosecution team in the case against a former executive at Valeant Pharmaceuticals International, Gary Tanner, and a former CEO of Philidor Rx Services, Andrew Davenport, who were convicted in May as part of a $9.7 million kickback scheme.

In all, he tried seven cases to verdict, all resulting in convictions, including in the case against film producer David Bergstein, convicted of defrauding investors of more than $26 million.

Allen said it was the right time to leave the prosecutor's office this year. “I had done a lot of stuff, I had tried a lot of cases and argued a lot of appeals,” he said. After his second trial this year, he said, “I felt it was professionally a good time in my life to make a change.”

Allen said he didn't consider any other firms and contacted his Kirkland colleagues when deciding to return to private practice. “I thought it's a growing firm and I really like the people there and they do top-notch work,” said Allen about Kirkland, which is now ranked as the world's largest law firm by gross revenue.

Allen overlapped at Kirkland and at the U.S. attorney's office with Robert Khuzami, a Kirkland partner who is now deputy U.S. attorney in the Southern District. Kirkland has not often recruited from the Southern District U.S. Attorney's Office in recent years, but it does have some well known SDNY alumni in its ranks, including Neil Eggleston and Henry DePippo.

Despite a drop-off in some types of enforcement actions under the Trump administration, Allen said he believes a “strong enforcement program” by the Justice Department and regulatory agencies will continue. For instance, he said cases that might otherwise be civil have developed criminal components as the Securities and Exchange Commission and U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission bring in the U.S. Attorney's Office and Main Justice's Fraud Section. “The result of this will be larger and more complicated investigations,” he said.

“Overall numbers of cases are down a bit in recent years, but it's hard to draw too much from that—it could just be that the agencies are focusing on larger or more complicated investigations at the expense of smaller, one-off cases,” Allen said.