St. Louis Missouri – November 2021 – For three decades, Husch Blackwell Partner Gregg Sofer has worked as a prosecutor at the highest levels of government. In those roles, he was often in the headlines for sending vicious criminals to prison.

Today, Sofer is using his experience as a government lawyer to help keep companies out of trouble, especially with the government.

“A lot of the work we do isn’t that someone has been charged with a crime, it is all the things that happen before someone is charged with a crime,” Sofer said. “So compliance work and internal investigations, all of that is done in an effort to insure people don’t get in trouble, don’t find themselves on the wrong side of a charging instrument from the government either civil or criminal.”

Sofer’s extensive experience as a government prosecutor is an asset to clients.

 “If you wanted to knock down a bridge, how would you figure out a way to knock it down,” Sofer asks. “You’d go probably to the architect of the bridge.”

Sofer counsels businesses and individuals in connection with a range of criminal, civil and regulatory matters.

“If you want to know how to beat the government you have to know how they do things,” Sofer said. “I think I have an unusually broad breadth of experiences that let me know how exactly how you would take that bridge apart.”

“He is a bulldog,” Catherine Hanaway, the Chair of Husch Blackwell said. “When the government launches one of these investigations, it’s enterprise threatening, it’s liberty threatening for the individual.You may be going to prison so you have to have someone who is going to fight like they are fighting for their life and that’s Gregg.”

After graduating from New York University School of Law, Sofer became an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.

“He’s charming, he can be aggressive when it is necessary,” the Honorable Leslie Crocker Snyder, a retired New York Supreme Court Judge said. “He is incredibly smart, well-prepared. He is a brilliant lawyer.”

The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 changed the direction of Sofer’s career.

“I was looking up at what I thought was the exit hole from the first tower when the second plane crashed into the second tower,” Sofer said. “I was so close I could feel the heat from the fireball.”

“It really just changed my life immediately,” Sofer said. “I began to think that everything I was doing had no meaning.”

“The only thing I wanted to do was try to make sure that something like that never happened again,” Sofer said. “I started looking for a job frankly the next day in the federal government doing counterterrorism work.”

Sofer took a job with the Department of Justice in Washington D.C. handling matters including National Security and counter terrorism. He would later become a counselor to the United States Attorney General.

He served as both an assistant US Attorney and then the US Attorney for the Western District of Texas.

“I’m very comfortable… a lot more than I thought I would be… switching sides to help people on the other side,” Sofer said. “I put a lot of people in prison in my life. I was very good at it and I am interested in trying to help folks avoid some of the ugly consequences of getting on the wrong side of the government.”

 --Paul Schankman, StorySMART