A financial crisis coupled with a change in administration sounds like a good recipe for a stew of litigation and government enforcement action. It largely worked out that way when Barack Obama took the White House in the wake of the mortgage meltdown. Will the incoming Biden administration and the current pandemic-driven economic climate cook up a similar litigation feast? 

Chuck Connolly, co-head of the white collar defense and government investigations practice at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, expects a shift away from the immigration and drug prosecutions that have been the hallmark of the Trump DOJ to more corporate fraud, civil rights, and environmental matters. Connolly, who was chief of the financial crimes & public corruption unit in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia during the earlier economic crisis, expects the early Biden administration to mirror the early Obama days.