Nicole D. Lueddeke 

Five years ago, Nicole D. Lueddeke was an associate in Paul Hastings’ white-collar defense practice when she was asked to manage a portion of the investigation the firm had taken on for a multibillion-dollar Japanese medical device company that had discovered and disclosed violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Her assignment was to oversee the work in Asia, the Pacific and China.

She did so well that she was assigned to manage the work in Latin America, too, for a total of 17 countries where the investigation had uncovered potentially improper payments. From there, she gave briefings to the Justice Department’s FCPA unit and the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles.

As part of all that, Lueddeke won approval from the DOJ and the SEC to use a technology-assisted analytics system, which she helped design and test, to review 40 million documents. The analytics model cut the material down to one million documents that people could then examine.

“It’s a huge time and resource savings for the client,” she said. It just requires “a little bit of lawyer time and elbow grease.”

Her work continues. She is in the middle of discussions with prosecutors about the amount of disgorgements necessary to resolve the case.

“I’ve really seen this matter from start to finish,” Lueddeke said. “And this is the matter that kicked off my expertise in the life science sector.”

In a newer case, she is helping represent a U.S.-based multibillion-dollar medical technology company that also found some serious FCPA issues. Lueddeke oversaw the voluntary disclosures to the Justice Department and the SEC and now is managing a global team of more than 25 associates working on what has turned out to be one of Paul Hastings’ largest white-collar cases.

Lueddeke has worked on cases closer to home, too. She was part of the trial team that represented Rear Admiral Bruce Loveless in the high-profile “Fat Leonard” Navy corruption scandal. Loveless was the one person out of 34 originally charged to be acquitted. U.S. v. Newland, 3:17-cr-00623 (S.D. Cal., filed March 10, 2017).

She also had an unusual assignment for a large, private university at the center of the Varsity Blues college admissions investigation. She helped the school develop a “disciplinary matrix” for how to discipline the students involved. Their knowledge of the scheme and level of involvement varied drastically, she said. “We had to figure out student by student what the appropriate penalty could be in a consistent and fair manner.”

Within the firm, Lueddeke is the new chair of the summer program for the L.A. office. “I’m involved in mentoring and guiding students through the whole process from on-campus interviewing to callbacks to the summer program and ultimately when they receive an offer,” she said.

— Don DeBenedictis