Harter Secrest & Emery LLP, a full-service business law firm with offices throughout New York, welcomes Sheila Baynes to the firm’s Government & Internal Investigations practice group.
Baynes joins Harter Secrest & Emery from Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP in Washington D.C. where she was a member of the firm’s Supreme Court and Appellate practice and handled high-stakes appeals. Prior to her practice at Orrick, Baynes was an Honors Attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice in the Environmental and Natural Resources Division where she litigated trials and appeals and negotiated cases to resolution, receiving the Assistant Attorney General’s Award for Excellence.
Baynes attended New York University School of Law on the nation’s premier public service scholarship, the full-tuition Root-Tilden-Kern Scholarship. There, she worked for leading legal scholars, including former NYU Law Dean and current OIRA Administrator Richard Revesz, D.C. Circuit Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, former White House Counselor Jody Freeman, and former U.S. Sentencing Commissioner Rachel Barkow. Baynes graduated from law school magna cum laude, winning recognition with the Maurice Goodman Memorial Prize, which is awarded for outstanding and passionate academic achievement and the “promise to become a thought leader in the legal community.”
Baynes comes to Harter Secrest & Emery with years of regulatory and criminal litigation experience. She has worked with more than a dozen federal agencies and is well versed in administrative law. A seasoned litigator, Baynes’s criminal law experience includes winning a Fourth Amendment case in the U.S. Supreme Court, Torres v. Madrid, 592 U.S. __, 141 S. Ct. 989 (2021).
The Harter Secrest & Emery Government and Internal Investigation practice is led by a former Assistant U.S. Attorney from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, who has been the sole lawyer outside of New York City ranked by Chambers USA as a leading New York lawyer in the field of Litigation: White-Collar Crime for the past three years. The group advises clients in all aspects of government investigations and litigation. The team has a significant False Claims Act practice and represents clients in matters involving securities, health care, civil rights, antitrust, government contracting, public corruption, and fraud, among a variety of other areas, and frequently represents organizations and professionals in the education and health care sectors. The practice group also conducts internal investigations, including independent investigations for private and public organizations, including Boards, Audit Committees, Special Committees, and municipal governments.