Daniel Alonso of Buckley LLP.

Daniel Alonso, a former top deputy at the Manhattan District Attorney's Office who has spent the past five years at consulting firm Exiger, has returned to private practice. He joined Buckley this week as a partner in New York.

Ben Klubes, Buckley's managing partner, said it has long been a "strategic priority" for his Washington, D.C.-based firm to add a high-level white-collar partner with government experience to the firm's team in New York. Alonso, a former federal prosecutor and Kaye Scholer partner who had served as the chief assistant district attorney in Manhattan, was a "natural fit," he said.

Alonso said in an interview that he joined Exiger when it had just 20 employees and it grew to 600 employees in six countries by the time he left in late January. He said the work at Exiger was exciting but said he met several Buckley partners over the years and was intrigued by the chance to return to the practice of law—and not just in the white-collar arena.

Monitorships, civil litigation and anti-corruption advisory work will likely be part of his practice. Latin American matters will be a particularly "big part" of the job, said Alonso, adding that he speaks Spanish and conversational Portuguese.

Alonso has been a prominent figure in criminal justice for years, having led the criminal division at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York before joining Kaye Scholer in the mid-2000s. In 2010, he went to work for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. Since leaving the post in 2014 to go to Exiger, he has written columns and weighed in on the public discourse around law enforcement.

Alonso said he was tapped by Michael Cherkasky, another alumnus of the Manhattan DA's Office and now Exiger's executive chairman, when Cherkasky was seeking to build a larger consulting business around his HSBC monitorship.

As a managing director there, Alonso was responsible for monitoring the New York City Housing Authority's Hurricane Sandy relief program for possible fraud and for monitoring a New York City waste hauler. He was also named by an Arizona federal judge to be an independent disciplinary authority for the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, which has fought in court for years against claims that it violates the rights of Latinos.

Cherkasky praised Alonso as a fantastic legal writer and a "natural" at business, saying "he did five great years with us and really helped us go from nothing to … over $100 million" in annual revenue.

While he said he expects to remain in touch with Exiger clients, Alonso said the work Exiger did for them and the work he might do for them is "apples and oranges." Services like data analytics and compliance testing, not legal work, are areas where Exiger competes, he said.

Klubes said Alonso will be "a very important part" of the firm's offering to clients in the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and white-collar fraud area, working with D.C. partners such as Henry Asbill and Preston Burton.