Biography: Business Crime Defence

John F Savarese has been a partner in the litigation department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York for over 15 years. He has represented numerous Fortune 500 corporations, major financial institutions and senior executives in SEC and other regulatory enforcement proceedings, as well as white-collar criminal investigations, complex securities litigation, and internal investigations. His extensive experience includes major investigations concerning accounting fraud, insider trading, criminal tax, criminal antitrust and the Wall Street research-analyst allegations.

Mr Savarese joined Wachtell Lipton in 1988, after working in the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where he tried numerous jury trials, received the Attorney General's John Marshall Award for Outstanding Legal Achievement, and also served as chief appellate attorney. Prior to his work with the United States Attorney's Office, Mr Savarese served as a law clerk to Justice William J Brennan of the United States Supreme Court, and to the Honorable Louis H Pollak of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Mr Savarese teaches a course on white-collar criminal law and procedure at Harvard Law School. He is also a frequent lecturer and panellist for the American Bar Association, Stanford Law School's Directors' College programme, the Practising Law Institute, and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association concerning a wide variety of topics, including defending civil and criminal litigation, handling corporate crises and conducting internal investigations. He has written numerous articles on those subjects and serves as a member of the board of editors of the Securities Litigation Report.

Mr Savarese was recently named the first chairman of a newly formed committee on white-collar criminal law of the New York City Bar Association and also is chairman of the board of trustees of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York. He is a member of the dean's advisory board at Harvard Law School and a member of the board of the lawyers' committee for civil rights under law.

Mr Savarese graduated, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in 1977 and received his JD, cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1981, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Mr Savarese is regularly recognised as one of the world's top litigators, being selected in The International Who's Who of Business Lawyers, Chambers USA and Lawdragon's 500 Leading Lawyers in America.