Former federal prosecutor Danny Ashby has moved his white-collar and corporate investigations practice to O’Melveny, the firm said Tuesday.
The addition of Ashby, who was previously at Morgan Lewis, comes nearly two weeks after O’Melveny recruited a five-partner corporate team from Locke Lord.
After clerking for Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Ashby began his career as a trial attorney in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and as a special assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. The past six-plus years at Morgan Lewis have included leading the firm’s litigation and white-collar teams in Dallas.
“Many of us have worked with [Ashby] over the years, and we know what an outstanding lawyer he is, both inside and outside the courtroom,” Rich Goetz, co-chair of O’Melveny’s litigation department, said in a statement. “We also know how widely respected he is in the Texas legal community and the white collar bar.”
In 2019, Ashby and a team of lawyers at Morgan Lewis represented Terence Carlyle Smith, the former president of the Federal Home Loan Bank in Dallas, in a federal criminal investigation that ended in Smith and two other executives pleading guilty to charges that they conspired to make false statements and filed bogus reimbursement requests to the government-sponsored mortgage lender in a $1.2 million fraudulent scam.
Before his time at Morgan Lewis, Ashby practiced at K&L Gates. While there, he guided former Affiliated Computer Services Chief Financial Officer Kevin Kyser in reaching a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.