As prosecutors or defense attorneys in civil and criminal cases, or as independent counsel examining internal workplace matters, alumni are specializing in one of the legal field’s hottest and most fascinating practice areas: investigations.
Eric Rosen ’05 was an assistant U.S. attorney investigating a routine securities fraud case in 2018 when he stumbled upon a tangential tidbit about a man who had paid Yale University’s women’s soccer coach to recruit his daughter so she would be guaranteed admission to the school. Rosen’s discovery led him “down a rabbit hole,” he says, and to a yearlong, covert investigation that culminated in the 2019 indictment of 57 people in the college admissions scandal dubbed “Varsity Blues.”
The case had all the elements that Rosen relished about federal investigations. “I enjoy the case-building process and the cloak-and-dagger elements—wiretapping, search warrants, recruiting informants,” he says. After the convictions and his newfound prominence from the frenzied media coverage, Rosen decided to go into private practice as a partner at Freedman Normand Friedland in Boston. “The goal is always the same with any investigation,” he continues. “As a prosecutor, it’s to get admissible evidence that will ultimately convict. And now as a defense attorney who knows how an investigation works, I do the opposite and try to unravel what they’ve done and poke holes into it.”
Whether Columbia Law alumni are white collar defense...
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