Hartley M. K. West

West’s extensive experience in white collar criminal defense and asset forfeiture matters stems from her work as an assistant U.S. attorney in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District. As a partner at the disputes and investigations-focused firm of Kobre & Kim, she has handled cases and investigations involving alleged violations of antitrust, trade secret, securities fraud, tax fraud, health care fraud, money laundering, public corruption, national security and export enforcement laws.

As an AUSA, she served as deputy chief of the economic crimes and securities fraud section. “I have taken a well-worn path from prosecutor to criminal defense,” West said, pointing out that her first job, after graduating with honors from Harvard Law School, was as a junior associate at the firm then known as McCutchen Doyle Brown & Enersen LLP, where she also worked on defense-side cases. She was a federal prosecutor from 2002 to 2017. In 2009 she won an Attorney General’s Award for Superior Performance.

“That background helps me help clients now by understanding how the U.S. attorney approaches investigations, especially when there is a parallel investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission,” she said.

The pandemic put a sudden if temporary halt to a busy travel schedule that had West trotting the globe on client matters. “In January 2020 I was in Zurich three times, but I haven’t been on a plane since,” she said. From the West Coast she also frequently linked with her firm’s Hong Kong, Seoul and Shanghai offices.

“I was brought on at Kobre & Kim to launch our white collar and criminal investigations practice here on the West Coast,” she said. “The K&K model is to have former DoJ lawyers in all our offices, but this one at first practices in the IP space. When I got here, from McCutcheon and the DoJ, I knew everybody in the white collar space in the Bay Area.

West currently represents Paul F. Giusti, a former executive of the San Francisco-based waste management company Recology Inc., who was accused in November 2020 by federal prosecutors of bribery and money laundering in the sprawling municipal government corruption probe centered on former Department of Public Works director Mohammed Nuru. The charges against Giusti allege that he provided Nuru with more than $1 million in money and benefits to influence Nuru to act in Recology’s favor, including by supporting an increase in the fees Recology charged the city. U.S. v. Giusti, 3:20-mj-71664 (N.D. Cal., filed Nov. 18, 2020).

The case is in its early stages, and West declined to discuss it in detail. But she noted that the criminal complaint includes novel charges that her client provided a stream of benefits and not a single payment in a bribery scheme and that some of the benefits to Nuru were reputational.

“It’s an unusual and challenging case for the government to prove,” she said.

— John Roemer