Sep. 22, 2016
Richard Marmaro
See more on Richard MarmaroSkadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates
As the head of Skadden's West Coast Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement and white collar defense practice, Marmaro is consistently a go-to for heavyweight matters.
In one of his highest publicity trials, Marmaro successfully defended Broadcom Ltd. executive William J. Ruehle, making the largest stock options backdating case brought by the federal government a failure after a judge in 2009 threw out all charges.
At present, Marmaro is in the latter stages of pretrial work — which has stretched out over seven years — in a trial that's not expected to begin until mid-2017. Though the preparation time has been long, he anticipates a quick trial for his team representing U.S. military food service contractor Agility Public Warehousing Co. KSCP, the prime vendor in an $8.6 billion contract to provide service to troops in Kuwait and Iraq from 2003 to 2010.
The diligent preparation his team has invested has Marmaro feeling secure about the case, which has been described as the largest criminal contracting fraud case ever filed by the government. "The longer you take analyzing the issues, it sometimes makes the trial shorter," Marmaro said. "We feel very confident."
When asked about the secret to his success, Marmaro said there isn't one. "I've been fortunate to have very good teams of lawyers, and we've been able to present a cogent argument to the judge and jury. There's no secret except for enormous pretrial preparation and knowledge of all the facts and legal issues involved."
Marmaro also said he was very fortunate to have been trained in the early part of his white collar defense career by "the preeminent white collar defense lawyer of our time, Stephen V. Wilson," now a federal judge in the Central District in Los Angeles, who "was the king of the white collar bar." Marmaro later became Wilson's law partner at the firm formerly known as Hochman, Salkin & DeRoy.
In the 1980s, Marmaro spent five years as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office, specializing in business crimes. Then, he took that knowledge and "basically reverse-engineered it to become a good defense lawyer," Marmaro said.
"There's one thing I think is unique about me: I have no fear of the federal government, and so I approach every case as if my client is innocent and the government must be wrong."
— L.J. Williamson
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