Douglas S. Zolkind is a litigation counsel based in the New York office and a member of the firm’s White Collar & Regulatory Defense Group. He has extensive trial experience and focuses his practice on white collar criminal defense, government investigations, and internal investigations. He defends corporate and individual clients in criminal and regulatory enforcement matters around the world.
Prior to joining Debevoise, Mr. Zolkind was an Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), serving as a senior member of the Criminal Division’s Public Corruption Unit. Prior to joining SDNY, Mr. Zolkind was a litigation associate at another international law firm.
At SDNY, Mr. Zolkind led investigations, prosecutions, and trials in cases involving foreign bribery and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), wire fraud, money laundering, business and political corruption, bank fraud, securities offenses, and cybercrime. He handled many high-profile white collar matters, including an FCPA trial against a Macau-based real estate tycoon involving corruption at the highest levels of the United Nations; an FCPA trial against a former cabinet-level Hong Kong official involving efforts by a Chinese energy company to bribe top officials in Chad and Uganda; a trial against one of the most senior officials in New York State for bribery, extortion, and fraud; and the prosecution of a bank Chairman & CEO for engaging in a bribery scheme with a top adviser to the then-President of the United States.
Mr. Zolkind is a member of the Federal Criminal Practice Committee of the Federal Bar Council, and a member of the White Collar & Securities Enforcement Executive Committee of the UJA-Federation. He is also a co-executive editor of the firm’s monthly FCPA Update newsletter.
He has clerked for the Hon. Janice Rogers Brown on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and for the Hon. P. Kevin Castel on the U.S. District Court for the SDNY.
Mr. Zolkind received his J.D. summa cum laude from Cornell Law School in 2008, where he was an articles editor of the Cornell Law Review. He obtained his B.A. summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005.