The Fact Pack: Columbia Law Alumni Are Savvy Investigators

Daniel Suleiman and Jason Criss were featured in a Columbia Law School Alumni article about how "alumni are specializing in one of the legal field’s hottest and most fascinating practice areas: investigations."

As the piece states, Daniel Suleiman honed his investigative skills working in the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 2010 to 2013. “That is where I really got exposed to digging into investigations on a daily basis,” As a white collar defense attorney, “I love criminal investigations when the stakes are high, and you’re interacting with the Department of Justice and prosecutors and navigating the whole process. It’s fun work.”

Law firms, says Jason Criss, a member of Covington's Institutional Culture and Social Responsibility Group, are also often better suited than management consultants to do workplace culture reviews and racial equity assessments and audits for organizations.

“We think the skill set we’ve developed—interviewing people, marshaling a lot of disparate facts, developing themes that get at root causes, and making recommendations—is the reason why it’s valuable to have attorneys doing this work,” said Jason, who has co-led a number of workplace culture reviews and internal investigations into sexual misconduct at CBS News and at the boarding school Choate Rosemary Hall. “It is also the case that often this kind of work is either specifically prompted by a legal claim or there is a potential for a legal claim that could create a liability for a company or entity, and therefore having lawyers thinking from that perspective can be very valuable.”

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