Well, that’s a very good question, and people – by the way, a lot of times, when people are accused of a white-collar crime, they go out and hire their DWI lawyer or they go out and hire the person that wrote their will, and usually, that person realizes, “We need to get a white-collar defense lawyer.”

And there’s two areas of practice, and the one area is defending the case that has been charged. So somebody’s been indicted in federal court for insider trading or somebody’s been indicted in federal court for a series of mail frauds and wire frauds and money launderings. We defend that, and that’s very similar to the way that you practice law in state court on murders and rapes and robberies and other offenses that appear more commonly in state court.

However, in federal court, the indictment frequently comes months or years after you become aware of the fact that you’re under investigation. We generally become aware that we’re under investigation in two ways: one is they crash into your place of business with a search warrant and cart off several trucks full of file cabinets in the old days. Nowadays, they take every computer in the whole place.

And so when there’s a search warrant executed, we know that this company and some of its employees are under investigation, and you have the opportunity to do what we call “pre-charge representation.” I don’t mean “pre-charge” like you haven’t been charged a fee for the lawyer yet; I mean pre-charge you haven’t been charged with a crime yet, and we’ll talk about what pre-charge representation is, but the other area is, the FBI is out knocking on doors or the Drug Enforcement Agency’s out knocking on doors, and drug cases, not so much. Very common in white-collar offenses that they knock on doors and said, “Did you buy some of these securities from John Smith? Did you invest in this business plan that Mr. Jones was selling a few years back?” And frequently, Mr. Smith or Mr. Jones hear back, “Hey, the FBI was out here.” Well, that’s an indication that the FBI is preparing a criminal case against you.

And so now we’re at the point where you have the opportunity to hire a lawyer to represent you during the course of the investigation or on a pre-charge basis. It is critical to get lawyers who have done that.

Many criminal defense lawyers who do not have a sophisticated practice, they represent people who’ve been accused of DWI, who’ve been accused of domestic assault, who’ve been accused of a rape or a child molesting charge, and they wouldn’t know what to do if somebody comes in and says, “I think I’m under investigation.” They say, “Ah, well, come back if you get charged.” That’s not a good plan, and it’s especially not a good plan – by the way, I represent people on a pre-charge basis on the whole gamut. It’s not uncommon in a sexual assault or child molesting, but it’s most common in federal white-collar crimes because there is almost always a period of at least six months, and sometimes, years – two and three and four years – where the case is under investigation and there are things that you can do. You can follow along behind the federal investigators, and when they talk to a witness, you can talk to a witness. If they’ve taken all your computer records, you can try to get them back so you can prepare a defense.