University of Illinois College of Law

Pravin Rao is a Partner at Perkins Coie LLP with former experience as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice and an enforcement attorney with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. His represents companies, boards, and senior executives in criminal and regulatory matters involving internal investigations, corporate governance, compliance counseling, and cross-border government inquiries by the DOJ, SEC, CFTC, FINRA, Federal Reserve, IRS, state attorney generals, and other agencies. Pravin handles issues related to accounting and financial fraud, foreign and domestic bribery and corruption, Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctions, money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, insider trading and other securities fraud, cybersecurity, ransomware attacks, data privacy, tax fraud, the False Claims Act, and related civil litigation. 

He was appointed by the DOJ and SEC as the FCPA Monitor of a large multinational corporation to oversee, evaluate, and test its anti-corruption compliance program, one of only 36 such appointments in the last decade.  He has also served as a court-appointed examiner in a federal bankruptcy proceeding where he was tasked with investigating a company’s pension program. 

In his role as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and SEC Enforcement Branch Chief, Pravin supervised and developed strategies in complex investigations that targeted violations of federal criminal and securities laws involving large publicly traded companies, officers and directors, broker-dealers, investment advisors, and hedge funds. Pravin also prosecuted violations of state criminal laws as a Cook County Assistant State’s Attorney. He has first-chaired numerous jury trials and argued appeals in both federal and state courts.

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