Biography • Business Crime Defence

John F Savarese has been a partner in the litigation department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz for over 20 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 arising out of the financial crisis of 2008, as well as accounting fraud, insider trading, criminal tax and criminal antitrust.

Mr Savarese joined Wachtell Lipton in 1988, after working in the United States Attorneys' 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 Attorneys' 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 and was recently named the first chairman of the newly formed white-collar criminal law committee of the New York City Bar Association. He also is 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, speaking on 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 Wall Street Lawyer. Mr Savarese also is chairman of the board of trustees of the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, 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, and has been selected in Who's Who Legal?, Chambers USA and Lawdragon's '500 Leading Lawyers in America'.