Justin Weddle, who spent five years at Brown Rudnick after a 15-year career at the Justice Department, quietly launched his own New York boutique last month.

His two-lawyer firm also includes former Brown Rudnick associate Julia Catania. In an interview with ALM, Weddle said while he greatly enjoyed his time at Brown Rudnick, he simply wanted to be his own boss. Weddle said he plans to use technology and other arrangements to tackle a range of large and small cases in his white-collar defense boutique.

Among his ongoing matters, Weddle is representing Jeffrey Wada, a former staffer at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board who awaits sentencing after being convicted of sharing regulatory secrets with auditors at KPMG. Weddle has also represented Alfredo Hawit, a Honduran football official charged in the FIFA corruption scandal.

His cases have also included defending Paul Robson, accused of participating in a Libor-rigging conspiracy, as well as handling litigation in the U.S. related to a major Brazilian corruption investigation and cases related to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's appointment of administrative law judges and its use of disgorgement.

While Weddle Law, as his new firm is called, may not be handling the Dieselgate-type defenses or investigations that require a dozen associates to jet across the country, Weddle said he is off to a busy start. Like many lawyers, he said, he has embraced the use of technology to help him keep costs low while enabling his firm to punch above its weight when cases get complex.

“I don't have a copy service. I don't have a giant file room,” he said. “I manage my documents on my iPad.”

Weddle said conflicts weren't really an issue at Brown Rudnick and not something that drove his decision to launch his own firm. That said, he noted that big law firms are sometimes wary of taking on individual clients because of the risk of a conflict. And at the prices big law firms charge, he said, going to trial can be unaffordable for some clients.

By starting one's own firm, Weddle said, “you have the freedom to continue to do the same types of white-collar work [as big law firms do] by scaling up or scaling down as appropriate.”

As a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, Weddle worked in the Computer, Hacking and Intellectual Property section, the Major Crimes Unit, the Complex Frauds Unit and the Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force. His high-profile cases in the prosecutor's office included Rajat Gupta's appeal of his insider-trading conviction and the United States v. KPMG and United States v. Stein tax-shelter cases.

From 2008 to 2010, he was the resident legal adviser—something of a diplomatic role, he said—to an international law enforcement “fusion center” in Romania, and after returning to New York, he became a deputy chief appellate attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office.