Janet I. Levine

Levine is a Kendall Brill & Kelly partner who focuses on white collar and regulatory enforcement matters, criminal and regulatory investigations and complex civil and criminal trials. Encouraged to become a prosecutor in the 1980s by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge for whom she clerked, the late Arthur L. Alarcón, who had been one himself, Levine faced a hiring freeze at the Los Angeles district attorney’s office.

So she worked for three years as a Central District federal defender before going into private practice. Levine noted a difference between defense lawyers who have trained as prosecutors and those, like herself, who came from the federal defender bar.

“Going in, I didn’t know much about grand jury practice, though I quickly caught up,” she said. “Those who come out of a prosecutor’s office may start out as defense lawyers having client control issues, because they haven’t had much in the way of personal relations with clients. But it develops. After a few years you can’t tell where people started out.”

Levine said that with the oncoming Biden administration, she’s anticipating a significant shift in emphasis in the white collar realm. “The last four years have been aberrant. There was almost a hard stop in enforcement except in health care. I expect a major increase in enforcement in environmental crimes and securities. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act had been a global growth area in applying societal norms in doing business abroad, but enforcement ground to a halt. So too in consumer fraud cases—there were hardly any.

Beyond that, she added, “Maybe now we’ll get a respite from the melodrama.”

These days, until cases are filed, Levine keeps matters tightly under wraps. Many of them involve investigations in which the client has not been charged and the nature and extent of the potential issue is not public.”

One highly public matter, however, is her representation of former Los Angeles city councilmember Mitchell Englander, who represented parts of the San Fernando Valley, charged in a seven-count federal indictment arising from an ongoing probe of corruption in city government. U.S. v. Englander, 20-cr-00035 (C.D. Cal., filed Jan. 16, 2020).

The FBI arrested Englander in March and he pleaded guilty to one count in June. The grand jury indictment said he accepted expensive favors in Las Vegas from lobbyists plus an envelope containing $10,000 in cash. Sentencing is set for January 2021.

“I don’t know what the [government’s] sentence request will be,” Levine said. “The plea agreement has no recommendation in it. He helped himself by accepting responsibility and coming forward, and it’s my job to point that out. He’s not hidden from his culpability.”

— John Roemer