Little sat next to client William Stover, the chief financial officer of the disgraced solar panel maker Solyndra LLC, at a congressional hearing last fall. First the camera flashbulbs flickered in a strobe-light storm. Then lawmakers asked question after question about the company's ignominious collapse. Each one invariably went unanswered as Stover followed Little's advice to invoke his rights against self-incrimination.
Little, a partner at Keker & Van Nest LLP in San Francisco, called Stover's Capitol Hill hearing "surreal" and "difficult to endure, for him and me."
Beyond that hearing, she's also assisted Stover in the various federal investigations that followed Solyndra's default on its $535 million loan guarantee from the government.
Little's involvement in the politically radioactive Solyndra matter was just one of several attention-grabbing cases she's handled in the past year. She said such matters add an "extra layer of complexity" to the legal issues at hand.
"Not only do you act as a lawyer, you have to think about the public perception of what you're doing," Little said.
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For more than 25 years Jan Little has handled high-stakes criminal investigations and trials and complex civil litigation for: publicly-traded corporations, private companies, and senior executives.
Ms. Little's criminal cases have included many substantive areas of white collar defense, including securities fraud, tax fraud, health care fraud, foreign corrupt practice/commercial bribery, money laundering, and public corruption. She has litigated and tried white collar criminal cases in dozens of jurisdictions across the nation. She has also represented corporations and executives in securities class and derivative actions, other commercial cases, and in proceedings before the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ms. Little also handles professional liability matters.