Benjamin E. Rosenberg

Benjamin E. Rosenberg represents clients in complex criminal, civil, and administrative proceedings, typically involving securities, commodities, or other financial instruments.

Mr. Rosenberg joined Dechert as a partner in 2005 with a group of lawyers from Swidler Berlin Shereff Friedman. He has focused his practice on white collar criminal defense and securities litigation, with a specific emphasis on defending executives and corporations in connection with governmental investigations, and proceedings of federal grand juries and offices of the United States Attorney, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Attorney General of New York, and the New York District Attorney. He has appeared in federal and state appellate and trial courts, and before administrative tribunals, in civil, regulatory, and criminal matters. His clients came from the fields of investment banking, mutual fund management, private equity investing (principally hedge funds), commodities trading, stock lending, industrial manufacturing, academia, music recording, radio broadcasting, and pollution control, among others. In 2013, he was ranked by The Legal 500 U.S. for his white-collar criminal defense practice, and was recognized by The International Who’s Who of Business Crime Defence Lawyers. In the same year, he was a member of the Dechert litigation team recognized as part of the Financial Times’ 2013 Top U.S. Innovative Law Firms for their “standout” work acting as lead counsel for an ad hoc group of creditors in connection with the highly contested cross-border restructuring of approximately US$1.6 billion in defaulted senior notes issued by Mexico's largest glass manufacturer, Vitro S.A.B. de C.V.

Mr. Rosenberg twice left Dechert to serve in government. He took an eighteen-month leave of absence from Dechert beginning in 2007 to serve as the Chief Litigation Counsel of the New York State Attorney General. He was in charge of the Office’s most high-profile investigation, and led the AG’s team investigating unlawful student lending practices. He also represented the Office in successfully defending the constitutionality of New York’s lis pendens statute. From 2014 through 2016, Mr. Rosenberg served as the General Counsel to the Manhattan District Attorney, where he represented the District Attorney in both trial-level and appellate courts, and was deeply involved in the District Attorney’s cyber-related initiatives, as well as his forfeiture and conviction integrity programs. He had also served the public prior to joining Dechert. Following graduation from law school, in 1985-86, he clerked for the Honorable Judge Edward R. Becker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and from 1990 to 1994 he was an Assistant United States Attorney in the criminal division in the Southern District of New York, where he tried and investigated cases involving narcotics trafficking, identification theft, perjury and obstruction of justice, and gang violence.

Mr. Rosenberg was twice nominated (in 2015 and 2016) to serve on New York’s Court of Appeals.

He has written extensively, including articles about grand jury practice, conspiracy law, discovery under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, petit jury instructions, sentencing matters, and harm and loss calculations in financial cases. Several of the articles have been cited in federal and state courts.

Mr. Rosenberg teaches as a Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, and as a Lecturer in American Studies at Columbia University.