Linda Imes | New York Criminal Lawyer | New York

Linda Imes, a founding partner of Spears & Imes LLP, has been a criminal and civil litigator for three decades, with substantial trial and appellate experience. She has focused on white collar criminal defense, securities enforcement, and complex civil litigation.

Early in her career, Ms. Imes was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. There, she served in the Major Crimes Unit and Securities and Commodity Fraud Unit prosecuting a wide variety of complex business and commercial crimes including tax evasion, money laundering, transportation of stolen property, bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, and securities fraud. During her years as a prosecutor, Ms. Imes had a dozen trials and argued as many appeals in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Ms. Imes has been in private practice since 1989 and has tried cases in federal court, before regulators, and to mediators. Ms. Imes has represented individuals and corporations in investigations by and matters involving the U.S. Attorney's Office, the Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA (formerly the New York Stock Exchange and NASD), the New York State Attorney General's Office, the District Attorney's Office, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the United States Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the Federal Reserve, and other governmental and regulatory bodies. Ms. Imes' work frequently involves defending clients faced with more than one investigation at a time, often combined with civil litigation. Since 2009, Ms. Imes has been named by Chambers & Partners as a Leader in the Field of White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations.

Ms. Imes has been involved in appellate advocacy since the beginning of her legal career, when she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. While at the United States Attorney's Office, Ms. Imes served as Deputy Chief of Appeals. In private practice, Ms. Imes has briefed and argued numerous cases in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, New York's Appellate Division, and the New York Court of Appeals. Most recently, in late 2011, she argued a Second Circuit appeal concerning the application of the Supreme Court's decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., 130 S. Ct. 2869 (2010), which held that Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 does not apply extraterritorially.

Ms. Imes is a member of the Federal Bar Council, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and the City Bar's White Collar Criminal Law Committee. She is also a member of the Board of the New York Council of Defense Lawyers.