Melinda Haag

Haag specializes in white collar cases, investigations and securities litigation and compliance matters as a partner at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe. She has been lead or co-lead counsel in more than 20 jury and bench trials. She was appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District by President Barack Obama in 2010, returning to Orrick in 2016.

The Department of Justice had a different approach when she was a federal prosecutor. “The attorney general never once asked me for metrics on charging and sentencing,” she said. “Numbers were irrelevant. Our marching orders were to invest in what’s important to the district.” She said that under President Joe Biden, “I expect the DoJ to go back to a focus on criminal justice reform.”

In mid-November, speculation on whom Biden would name as attorney general centered on two names. “We hear Sally Yates and Doug Jones, and I have huge respect for both,” Haag said, mentioning the former Acting Attorney General fired for insubordination by President Donald Trump and the former senator from Alabama known for his successful civil rights prosecution as a U.S. attorney of two Ku Klux Klan members for the Birmingham church bombing.

She said that when she visited Alabama, Jones showed her around. “He showed me the Baptist Church in Birmingham that was bombed” in 1963, killing four young African-American girls. “It was an impressive tour.”

Haag currently represents Wells Fargo Bank’s former general counsel in several matters stemming from the sham-account scandal, including penalty notices filed in January by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency seeking a $5 million civil money penalty. OCC v. James Strother, N20-001 (OCC, filed Jan. 23, 2020).

“This is a rare enforcement action that is set to be heard in the summer of 2021 by an administrative law judge,” Haag said. “Most such cases are filed and settled at the outset.”

She emphasized that the white collar team at Orrick works together and avoids “lead counsel” designations. The Strother matter is staffed by herself alongside colleagues Walter F. Brown Jr. and Randall S. Luskey, Haag said.

She also worked on an unusual case in the Southern District of New York for client David Britt, one of the defendants in a case against former KPMG auditors charged in a scheme to defraud an oversight agency. U.S. v. Middendorf et al., 18-cr-00036 (S.D. N.Y., filed Jan. 17, 2018).

Britt pleaded guilty, but in October 2020 received a lenient six-month home confinement sentence due in part to advocacy by Haag and other Orrick lawyers. “He’s Australian and has worked here in the U.S. for 30 years on a green card, and he’ll be deported. So the judge agreed that due to the severity of the deportation penalty, home confinement was appropriate.”

— John Roemer