What are some of your proudest recent achievements? The acquittal our team achieved for Robert Bogucki at trial before Judge Charles Breyer is certainly one of my proudest recent achievements. As Judge Breyer noted, he had never previously granted a Rule 29 motion in full before but did so here after being persuaded that the prosecution was ill-considered and unjust. Our whole trial team deserves real credit for that achievement. I'm also incredibly proud of the white-collar team we are building at Kaplan Hecker & Fink, which now includes former federal prosecutors and several former public defenders like myself.

Name a lawyer or mentor whose leadership inspired you. Judge John Gleeson has been an absolute inspiration to me. He spent his last few years on the bench personally leading the fight to revisit how the criminal justice system punishes those who have been found to have committed crimes—particularly as it related to the War on Drugs. He pioneered the use of alternatives to incarceration and demonstrated their effectiveness as a way of mitigating the harshness of federal sentencing laws. He railed against the use of mandatory minimum sentences and the filing of prior felony indictments against folks as a way for penalizing them for exercising their right to be tried by a jury of their peers. And, as importantly, since he has been in private practice, he has continued to fight this battle, now on behalf of indigent clients from around the country who are seeking to have draconian sentences revisited. There aren't many folks who have had as great an impact on the criminal justice system as John Gleeson.