On this Ropes & Gray podcast, litigation & enforcement partner Josh Levy and counsel JR Drabick—both former federal prosecutors—delve into the critical topic of crisis management for organizations and leaders. Drawing on Josh’s unique experience as the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, including his leadership during the high-profile resignation of U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins in May 2023 due to an ethical scandal, the conversation offers an insider’s perspective on navigating high-stakes crises in both public service and private practice. Gain insights into the structure and responsibilities of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the immediate challenges posed by unexpected leadership transitions, and the strategies employed to maintain organizational stability and public trust during turbulent times. The discussion highlights the importance of authentic communication, proactive leadership, and thorough preparation—both before and during a crisis. JR and Josh also share practical lessons for advising clients facing government investigations, media scrutiny, and other crisis scenarios, emphasizing the value of trusted advisors, clear processes, and legal protections.
Transcript:
JR Drabick: Hello, and welcome to this Ropes & Gray podcast. My name is JR Drabick, and I’m a counsel in Ropes & Gray’s litigation & enforcement practice group, and a former federal prosecutor. With me today is Josh Levy, a partner in our practice group, and the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, with whom I had the pleasure of serving during his tenure. Hi, Josh.
Josh Levy: JR, it’s good to be with you.
JR Drabick: It’s great to be together. We’re pleased to be talking today about crisis management, including about advising clients during high stakes crisis situations. This is a topic Josh knows well, having led the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts in the aftermath of former U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins’s resignation in May 2023. We plan today to pull back the curtain a bit on that experience and talk about leadership during crisis situations and how trusted advisors can help guide organizations and individuals through such situations. Let’s jump in. So, Josh, I’d like to start a little bit with your background. In January of 2022, you became the first assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. Before we talk about what that means, what was your career path up to that point?
Josh Levy: I think crises for organizations come out of the blue, and taking some time to think through how to best prepare for those and what’s worked in crises is really time well spent, so thanks for putting together this conversation. To answer your question, my career path has toggled back and forth between Ropes & Gray and the Department of Justice (“DOJ”). I came to Ropes & Gray in 1993 after a clerkship for a federal judge. I was there for four years, and I was pretty determined to become a federal prosecutor. It was something I was very eager to do because of the public service aspect of it. And I got that job in 1997. I spent seven years as an assistant U.S. Attorney (“AUSA”) in the Boston U.S. Attorney’s Office, practicing mostly white-collar criminal prosecutions. I was there on September 11th when two planes left from Boston. I got very involved in the government’s response to the investigation, 9/11. And Whitey Bulger was a fugitive at that point. I got very involved in the Whitey Bulger matter for a couple years. So, it’s a really diverse range of activities that I did.
After seven years, with law school loans hanging over my head and a bunch of kids at that point, I came back to Ropes & Gray. And I spent the next 17 years as a partner at Ropes & Gray, up until 2021. My practice was pretty much 100% government facing—a lot of criminal investigations, a lot of state attorney general work, Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) work, False Claims Act (“FCA”) investigations. I represented a lot of companies, and some of them were dealing with crises. I represented individuals. I represented the co-chair of Willkie Farr & Gallagher in the college admissions scandal, which was a very high-intensity media circus. I also spent 12 years representing individuals on the court appointed list, so cases where the federal court has private counsel represent individuals who can’t afford a lawyer. During those 17 years, I ended up having trials against the office that I was formerly a part of. So, that’s just a thumbnail on my career—lot of miles on the tires at this point.
JR Drabick: It’s a very impressive career. I have the pleasure of following your footsteps a bit, having started at Ropes myself, and then being beckoned by public service, and joining the SEC, and then also with the U.S. Attorney’s Office as well. So, you ultimately end up as the first assistant U.S. Attorney, Josh. What is the first assistant U.S. Attorney and the U.S. Attorney? What are their roles?
Josh Levy: For those of you who don’t know, and it is a confusing setup, the United States Attorney is the chief federal law enforcement officer in the district in which they serve. There are 93 U.S. Attorneys around the country. Some states, like Massachusetts, have one U.S. Attorney, and then a number of people who work under that person. Other states, like New York, have four U.S. Attorneys. So, people might’ve heard about the Southern District of New York and the Eastern District of New York. They divide up New York, a large state, into multiple districts. In Massachusetts, there are about 275-300 people who work in the United States Attorney’s Office across Boston, Worcester, and Springfield. And the first assistant is the person who is the number two in the office. Everyone else is called an assistant U.S. Attorney, who’s a prosecutor. There are about 125 assistant U.S. Attorneys who work in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the first assistant is the number two.
JR Drabick: And so, you stepped into that role. What sorts of cases was the office working on? What’s the breadth of the supervision you had?
Josh Levy: It varies. Among first assistants, I was pretty involved in the substance of the work. At a high level, the office does, on the criminal side, a lot of what I’ll call street crime, violent crime—so, gun offenses, narcotics trafficking. We started a human trafficking unit, which is a significant problem in a lot of communities, and there are a number of prosecutors who focus on that. So, you’ll see large scale cartels that are brought down and gangs that are terrorizing neighborhoods, that type of thing. And then, there’s a whole white-collar section. There’s the financial crimes unit, where you work, JR. There’s public corruption. There’s health care fraud. There are a number of prosecutors who are dedicated to that work on the criminal side. There’s also criminal civil rights unit, child exploitation prosecutions, that type of thing. That’s the criminal bucket—about two-thirds of the office is focused on criminal, maybe a little bit more.
Then, there’s a third that’s focused on civil, and they are bringing cases on behalf of the government, significantly in the False Claims Act space, which are cases brought for fraud against the government. The law empowers individual citizens to file cases on behalf of the government. Boston has been a leader really over the last 30-40 years in health care fraud prosecutions, which include both criminal and False Claims Act prosecutions. There’s a whole unit dedicated towards financial recoveries in criminal cases and other places where people owe the government money. And then, you defend the United States in court in the civil division. So, if you have a medical malpractice case that’s filed against the United States for something that happened at a VA Hospital, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is on the other side. If you get in an accident with a post office truck delivering the mail and you sue for damages, you’ll see the U.S. Attorney’s Office on the other side. If you work for the federal government and you’re terminated and you bring an unemployment claim, you’ll see the United States Attorney’s Office on the other side. And most notably, if you’re challenging actions by the executive branch, the United States Attorney’s Office plays a significant role in defending those in court. Both in the Biden and Trump administration, there have been a lot of litigations around executive orders, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office is involved in that. It’s a medium-sized law firm that has a very diverse practice but has one client: the United States.
JR Drabick: Thanks for that, Josh. With that background, why don’t we turn to May of 2023? For those who aren’t familiar, U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins announced that she was departing the U.S. Attorney’s Office in May of 2023 in what were, frankly, suboptimal and demoralizing circumstances. I was a line AUSA at the time, as Josh noted, prosecuting financial crimes, and on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday afternoon, received an email in my inbox from U.S. Attorney Rollins announcing that she would be stepping down at the end of the week. It was pretty startling and unexpected. The email was also short on details—details that we would soon learn, and that are publicly available in two reports, about investigations into her conduct as U.S. Attorney. She subsequently did step down, and Josh, you stepped into, on a moment’s notice, the U.S. Attorney’s role. What was that moment like from your perspective when you were thrust into that new role?
Josh Levy: It was probably one of the most significant professional challenges that I’ve had in my career—been practicing law for 30-some-odd years. Just to step back, I had applied to be the United States Attorney when President Biden was elected. There’s a process you go through. The senators put together a committee and you apply—pretty lengthy application, interview. I had been told I was one of the finalists. I didn’t get it. Rachael Rollins was the Suffolk County District Attorney. We had some mutual friends in the legal community but didn’t know each other too well at all. She reached out and asked me to take the position as the number two. And while I certainly wanted the number one position, I decided I wanted to give back, I wanted to be back in public service, and I thought I could make a contribution as the first assistant. That’s just the backdrop to the events of May of 2023. Think I knew more than the line assistants in the office, but I didn’t know a lot. Because of my role as the first assistant, I was certainly aware that there was an investigation. I was asked to testify several times about different things that they were looking into, but I really didn’t have the full picture until those reports came out. So, I was in a meeting with some colleagues on that Tuesday afternoon, and someone opened the door to the conference room and said, “Have you seen your email?” That’s how I found out about the resignation, and I immediately realized I had a huge crisis on my hands. I was short on details too at that point, but I realized that this was going to be one of the most significant events in the history of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, which dates back to founding of the country in terms of having a U.S. Attorney resign so suddenly.
JR Drabick: In that moment, Josh, the door gets opened. Your mind is racing, I’m sure. How do you decide what your next steps are? Who do you reach out to? What steps do you take? What are you thinking? What’s your strategy from jump street there?
Josh Levy: I guess in hindsight, I had the benefit of a couple days because the resignation was effective the end of the week. My first thought was, “How do we navigate an organization through this situation?” I think a lot of people have a different definition of what a crisis is, but some of the literature talks about a crisis is something that threatens the fundamental operations of an organization, and I felt that’s what we had at that point. So, I put together a plan for how I was going to deal with both the internal fallout from this resignation, and the external fallout from the resignation. I leaned on my senior leaders in the office. We had chiefs of the Criminal Division. We had a chief of the Civil Division, a very experienced communications person who’d been in the office a long time. And I leaned on that internal group to brainstorm on everything we needed to touch in terms of responding to this crisis and making sure that the critical work of the office continued. The people of Massachusetts, they don’t care about the internal workings of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. They want their streets safe. They want their kids to be able to go to school. They want the elderly folks in their families not to be scammed by all these online scams. They want their kids to be safe. And I had to make sure that I got our team as quickly as possible focused back on that mission.
JR Drabick: And so, with that in mind, Josh, and all of the different types of work the office does that you describe, how did you approach those external stakeholders that you then needed to work with?
Josh Levy: I’d been through other crises, not of this magnitude, but other crises in my practice. I had to deal with the sudden death of a beloved colleague when I was at Ropes & Gray. I learned through that, and I learned through counseling clients, that communicating is critical in these situations. I think a tendency is to retrench and play your cards close to the vest when you’re a leader—and there are certainly things you can’t communicate, but that doesn’t mean you don’t communicate. So, I move pretty quickly to communicating with the office. The first thing I did on the first Monday I was the U.S. Attorney was I asked everybody in the office to gather in our only meeting space, and I addressed the whole office. I included the interns. I included the paralegals. Everyone who makes that office run. The people from IT and admin, as well as the lawyers. I think it’s important in those situations to be authentic and to be willing to be a little bit vulnerable. If you want people to open up to you, you have to open up to them. So, I conducted that meeting, but I didn’t just make it up on my own, what I was going to say—I relied on people I trusted. That senior leadership team, I ran what I was going to say by them. I got some really good feedback from some of my senior leaders on what to say. I spent about an hour on the phone the weekend before with a guy named Chuck Rosenberg who’s been the U.S. Attorney in a couple different jurisdictions, who’s a really well-respected DOJ alum to walk me through how I should handle this with the troops. I was going through a difficult time in my own life at that point. My beloved father was very sick—ultimately, ended up passing away a couple months after the incident we’re talking about. I was just honest with my team about how I was feeling about things, and I wanted to give them an opportunity to express their concerns.
But then, I quickly pivoted to what I called the silver linings of what happened, which is, one, the reports were not about the work of the office. The assistant U.S. Attorneys were not going to have to go into court and have to deal with consequences for their cases from what happened there. It was all about external activities that former U.S. Attorney Rollins had engaged in, so that was a silver lining. The second silver lining is that the system worked—a series of allegations, and the Department of Justice looked into it. They spent a lot of time looking into it, and they produced a very thorough report.
I said that the office is so much bigger than the person who sits in the U.S. Attorney’s seat. You walk down the hall of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, there are pictures of all the U.S. Attorneys from the beginning, and they’re just a representative of the people who make that office function. I told the team, similar what I said to you, “The people of Massachusetts don’t care who the U.S. Attorney is. They need the office’s work done to make sure that they’re safe.” So, I did that. I decided that communication in a large group was important in the spirit of cohesion, and I decided to take some steps to enhance that. I also then went around, and I met with each of the units in the office. There are 19 different units. There’s the Public Corruption Unit, the Major Crimes Unit, the IT Unit, the Litigation Tech Unit. I met with all of them. I asked each of the leaders of these to set up a time for me to come by, and I just let people talk. I let people ask questions. I let people hear from me. No one’s really going to raise their hand in a meeting of 300 people, so I knew there had to be an opportunity for people to express what’s on their mind, and I knew my highest best use in those couple weeks was getting that office righted.
JR Drabick: I can speak to that, Josh, having been both in the large group meeting and in the individual unit meetings, and just seeing you in the halls in the immediate aftermath of U.S. Attorney Rollins’s resignation. There’s uncertainty. There’s unease. There’s a sense of, “What’s going to happen?” Having leadership step up and make themselves available, explain what they’re going through and the challenges they’re facing, and how they plan to address them, as you did, and then listening to people’s concerns and working with people to make sure that everybody understands that the work of the office must go on, and should go on. And, as you noted, we had the fortunate silver lining that it wasn’t the work of the office that was called into question. I think all those things made a huge difference because what it meant was that, as an organization, we were able to essentially rally together as a team and re-commit ourselves to the mission of the office, and I think that was, in large part, due to your leadership in addressing the crisis situation.
Josh Levy: JR, certain things stick out. I remember coming into work that Monday morning and seeing a very senior prosecutor, who I respected a lot, upfront on the street. And he turned to me, and said, “This is the first time I’ve ever been embarrassed to be part of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” It is a gut punch to me about how significant a blow this was to the office. People like you and me, and so many others who have pursued becoming a U.S. Attorney, it’s a calling. I think we all took a lot of pride to stand up in court and say, “Joshua Levy for the United States” because your client is justice. I know it sounds corny, but we all are in there to do the right thing in our cases. Sometimes that’s charging. Sometimes that’s not charging. Sometimes it’s giving someone a break. Sometimes that’s bringing an aggressive sentencing recommendation because someone’s victimized a lot of people. I felt like what happened there really compromised the integrity of the office, and I was laser-focused on restoring it.
I’d say one other thing for leaders—you need to put in the groundwork to be able to respond to a crisis. So, when I stood up in front of the whole office, I think most people in that room knew me, and knew something about me already, and knew of my commitment to the work of the office. I think it’s really important for leaders to walk the halls. Before I became the first assistant, I actually met with all 10 previous first assistants who I could get a hold of, and one common theme I got was, “Walk the halls. Know what’s going on in people’s cases. And when you meet with people, don’t make them come to your fancy office—go meet them in their office. Go see what’s on their walls. Are there pictures of kids? Is there artwork? Or is there some photo from some vacation they took? Learn something about them.” JR, I’d be curious your view of this, but I remember when I was a young assistant, and the first assistant or the U.S. Attorney would stop by my office and they knew something about a case on my docket, I was like, “Wow. What I’m working on really matters. They’re paying attention to it.” So, I think I was able to build on that spade work I had done over the year and a half I was the first assistant—it gave me momentum to help be able to navigate this crisis.
JR Drabick: I think that’s a great point, Josh. One of the things that we talk about in our current practice now advising companies and individuals who are in leadership at companies is tone at the top. And tone at the top is something that it’s hard to establish for the first time after a crisis is struck. It’s really something that is important to establish before the crisis occurs. Walking the halls, getting to know people, really taking an interest in their work and making yourself available to discuss issues so that perhaps you can avoid crises on the front end is really critical to that. I think that provides a good transition for us, Josh, to talk about, obviously, you’re back at Ropes. I have the pleasure and honor of being back at Ropes myself. We counsel organizations and individuals in some of their most challenging moments. You did that work before you became U.S. Attorney, and obviously you’re doing it again now. What are some of the lessons you took away from the experience you had that helps inform how you advise clients today?
Josh Levy: There are a couple things. That crisis I went through, but really any crisis, you need to take a breath and not be impulsive in your responses because you need to think through the array of issues that a crisis is going to precipitate. So, if you have a search warrant that’s executed at your offices, that’s a crisis. In that, immediately you have a DOJ issue, if it’s a criminal search warrant by the Department of Justice, and that’s your biggest problem. You need to consider all the downstream risks. What are your disclose obligations if you’re a public company? What are your notifications to your insurers? What is going to be your messaging to your internal community? What’s going to be your messaging to your external community? What are the risks of class action litigation arising on the issue the government’s investigating? You want to make sure you have all those things on the table.
We had an Air National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira who was leaking national security secrets on Discord. That was another crisis we had. We found out about that at 9:30 in the morning. We had him arrested by 4:00 in the afternoon. But understanding the damage he had done was a crisis period for the next couple weeks. I’m a big believer in identifying your crisis team and making sure that that team is on the phone together at least once a day, sometimes twice a day. You pick a time, like 8:00 in the morning or 6:00 at night, when no one’s going to be interrupted by other things, the other urgencies of a day, and everyone is getting the same read out. Miscommunication in a crisis can exacerbate the problem, as opposed to move you towards the path of getting things under control. So, that level of communication on your crisis team, I think, is really important—includes bringing in crisis communications experts on that.
Also, I talked earlier about avoiding a bunker mentality. Your organization knows you have a crisis, and you have to decide what can you share with them. And maybe it’s not too much, but you can share with them, “We’re on this. We got this. We have all the right people working on this day and night. We’ll report back to the organization when we can.” Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don’t speak as a leader in a time of crisis, you’re actually enhancing the distraction of the crisis because people are trying to figure out what’s going on. They’re gossiping in the halls. They’re not getting the work done that they need to get done. And they’re also dealing with uncertainty, which in itself is a distraction from their work. So, if you think about a crisis as threatening the fundamental operations of an organization, how do you mitigate that? I think communication cannot be emphasized enough.
JR Drabick: A clear theme here today is communication, listening, having a group that you can trust, and having that nuts-and-bolts setup of process. Is that right, Josh? The process often is very important to making sure that the end results substantively are what you want them to be.
Josh Levy: 100%. And you can’t predict the crisis you’re going to get, but you can, right now, starting today, think through, “Okay, if we have a crisis that hits our organization, who are the key people?” This is going to sound maybe pedestrian, but make sure you have every key leader’s cell phone in your cell phone if you’re the leader of the organization. Make sure you have a team that knows that they’re part of the crisis management team if something happens, and that they have to drop what they’re doing to be available. So, that level of preparation, in addition to just how you’re leading the organization currently, is going to serve you well when the crisis hits.
JR Drabick: Those are all great points, Josh. And having trusted advisors that can help quarterback that team externally, protect privilege when appropriate, help assemble any external advisors you might need depending on the situation, whether it’s forensics, PR, etc., are important things to help kick off that crisis response in the most advantageous way possible.
Josh Levy: Yes. Most crises, whether it’s a MeToo issue, a whistleblower, or some employment situation, some theft from the company, there are going to be legal consequences. Getting lawyers involved early is really important to protect the privilege, to make sure the litigation holds go out if people start deleting documents in a crisis to protect the organization. You have to make sure that they’re aware of their obligations to retain things. We talked about public company disclosure obligations. There are a lot of things that need to be dealt with right at the outset that lawyers experienced with crises can help you tackle right at the beginning.
JR Drabick: I think that’s a great place to end our conversation today, Josh. Thanks for all the insights on crisis management, for sharing your perspective on handling the crisis at the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Want to thank you for your service there. It’s been a pleasure talking today. If you’d like to learn more about our crisis management & investigations practice at Ropes & Gray, please feel free to contact either of us, or reach us via ropesgray.com. And you can subscribe to this and any other Ropes & Gray podcast wherever you regularly listen to podcasts, including on Apple and Spotify. Thanks again for listening.
