Richard E. Finneran is a partner in the firm’s St. Louis office. His practice concentrates on white collar criminal matters, corporate internal investigations, corporate compliance, and civil trial and appellate litigation.

From 2010 to 2017, Mr. Finneran served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, where he was responsible for prosecuting some of the region’s most significant white collar matters, including the two largest financial fraud trials ever conducted by that office. His caseload as a federal prosecutor featured investment frauds, embezzlements, Ponzi schemes, securities frauds, tax evasion, Bank Secrecy Act violations, cybercrimes, public corruption, and money laundering matters. Mr. Finneran also supervised federal agents and assisted prosecutors in numerous other federal criminal cases and investigations, including bank robberies, child pornography offenses, drug trafficking, and violent crimes. Mr. Finneran has tried several cases in federal court and argued numerous appeals in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.

Mr. Finneran’s work as a federal prosecutor has earned him accolades from across the legal profession. His cases have been featured nationally in Wired Magazine, NPR’s Planet Money, and NBC’s American Greed. In 2014, Mr. Finneran received Missouri Lawyers Weekly’s Legal Champion Award for his work in prosecuting the largest criminal fraud in the history of the Eastern District of Missouri. In 2016, he was honored with the Missouri Bar Foundation’s David J. Dixon Appellate Advocacy Award, which recognizes exceptional appellate practice by a member of the Missouri Bar.

During his time at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mr. Finneran supervised the office’s Suspicious Activity Report Review Team and was a frequent presenter on the subject of Bank Secrecy Act compliance. Mr. Finneran also served as a member of the U.S. Department of Justice E-Discovery Working Group and an instructor at the National Advocacy Center on trial presentation and litigation technology. A former member of the Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Advisory Committee of the Department of Justice, Mr. Finneran is recognized nationally for his knowledge in federal forfeiture law, with his academic writing on the subject having been prominently featured in the Cardozo Law Review.

Mr. Finneran’s representative experience since entering private practice has been marked by significant achievements in representing both individuals and organizations in white collar prosecutions and investigations.

• In one such representation, Mr. Finneran successfully persuaded federal prosecutors in Missouri not to bring an indictment against a child welfare organization being investigated for abuse, neglect, and false billing to Medicaid, and instead secured both a non-prosecution agreement for the organization and non-target assurances for the company’s officers, directors, and employees.
• In another such representation, Mr. Finneran convinced federal prosecutors in Wisconsin to forgo indictment of the CEO of a retirement plan services company and to permit a multimillion-dollar sale of the company prior to the CEO’s accepting a plea agreement that guaranteed a sentence of probation.
• Most recently, in a high-profile federal prosecution of a tech start-up founder and CEO in Chicago, Mr. Finneran successfully obtained court orders resulting in the release of more than $10 million in restrained property to his client and the compelled disclosure of internal government correspondence revealing the excessive nature of the government’s pretrial restraint.

Beyond these notable and widely publicized results, Mr. Finneran has obtained many more favorable results for clients while keeping the government’s investigations from ever becoming known to the general public.

Mr. Finneran also serves as an adjunct professor at Washington University School of Law, where he has instructed students in constitutional law, criminal procedure, and appellate advocacy and has been recognized three times as the Adjunct Professor of the Year. He also serves as the head coach of the school’s National Moot Court Team, which has won numerous national championships under his leadership.