Andrew St. Laurent learned a long time ago that victory for a lawyer and victory for a client aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Convincing a jury to return a verdict in the client’s favor that precludes prison or financial penalties, leading to splashy headlines and a cable news sound bite, is a win for the attorney and may look and feel like victory to the client in the moment. Ultimately, however, it may fail to undo damage to the client’s career, professional reputation or standing in the community.
“People don’t live in a courtroom; they live in the real world,” says one of the founding partners at Harris, St. Laurent. “If you win, after the verdict, there are tears and hugs and if it’s a high-profile case, there is press attention and you have the opportunity to say, ‘We were vindicated, and we won.’ But the reality in a criminal case is that there may be 70 percent of the people on the street who, if they’re asked and even if they know nothing about the case, will say, ‘They were probably guilty. They got off on a technicality.’ If your client is never charged, that never happens. The real victories are the ones that are not victories for the lawyers at all; they’re victories for the clients.”
Practicing law effectively, St. Laurent explains, is somewhat like an iceberg: 90 percent of it is out of sight. A graduate of Brown University, St. Laurent earned his law degree from Columbia before joining white-collar boutique firm Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason & Silberberg, as it was known at the time, and then becoming a public defender for the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan, where he tried more than a dozen cases through verdict.
Today, his practice in commercial litigation and white-collar and regulatory defense includes representing defendants in high-profile commercial cases.
He currently represents the former CFO of a public company who was sued in a federal securities class action along with the CEO and several other directors and officers following a high-profile stock drop. The court granted Harris St. Laurent’s motion to dismiss and denied plaintiff’s motion for leave to amend. That decision is now on appeal.
In another recent high-profile matter, St. Laurent represented a former UK-based Big Law partner who faced two RICO cases based on allegations of hacking, imprisonment of dissidents and attempted blackmail. Both cases against the partner were dismissed without any admission of wrongdoing and without any payment of money by the partner.
Finally, in another prominent matter, and the longest of St. Laurent’s current engagements, he is representing an institutional salesperson who received an 18-month suspension from FINRA in 2019. After exhausting appeals within FINRA, and a long but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to obtain relief from the Securities & Exchange Commission, St. Laurent is gearing up to appeal the SEC decision to the D.C. Circuit, raising a number of constitutional arguments about FINRA’s ability to prosecute violations of federal law.
Lawdragon: Tell me more about your transition from white-collar attorney to public defender. How did that come about?
Andrew St. Laurent: [In 2004] I had been at Morvillo Abramowitz for four years, and the typical career arc for somebody my age, with my level of experience, was to go into the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York, or to some other position in government – which I did not want to do. I'm not a prosecutor at heart, though it’s a an important job. That’s not what I wanted.
If you understand the client, if you explain the risks, if you try to accomplish the goals they give you, you cannot fail.
LD: So what drew you to the public defender's office?
ASL: I like the independence. And fighting the good fight. And really, you get to know your clients in a unique way. Good defense attorneys have to be able to practice at a really high level, but most importantly they have to be able to communicate effectively with their clients and understand what their clients want to achieve. Now, it’s not that different for prosecutors; a good prosecutor needs to really be able to identify, understand and empathize with a complaining witness in a unique way, or it doesn’t work. A good defense attorney can break the case open during cross-examination if the prosecutor wasn’t able to empathize with the witness and didn’t prepare them appropriately. In my view, the whole game is understanding your clients and their goals. If you understand the client, if you explain the risks, if you try to accomplish the goals they give you, you cannot fail. You can blow a trial, for sure. You can lose the appeal. Your client could get a life sentence, but you did not fail in your job because you went with your client, you met them where they were, and you took them where they told you to go. That's what I took away from that job. And that's the foundation of everything I do now.
LD: Were you seeing a high caseload volume as a public defender?
ASL: It’s always been a challenging job. There is always more you can do. The people who were 15 years senior to me when I came into that office in 2004 had been New York City public defenders in the '80s and '90s, which was a completely different animal in terms of caseload. I would have 30 indicted felonies and 150 cases in my portfolio at a time, which is a lot of cases for a human being. But 20 years earlier, people doing the same job would have 90 indicted felonies, and many of them violent: burglaries, gunpoint robberies, shootings and stabbings and murders, because that was what was happening in the City of New York. So, it was a heavy caseload. But it is a little bit like working in the emergency department at a hospital: There's always more you can do. You're always short of resources, but there's short of resources in a hospital during COVID and there's short of resources in September 2025, which is a different measure. I always felt I could render competent service to my clients. But I know people who had different experiences, and some of that is just the human beings who worked there. We had people who could carry 50 indicted felonies and they could do the work, and that's a lot. I tried 15 cases while I was there. Again, compared to the guys in the '80s, they would try 15 cases in six months. They'd just go back-to-back to back-to-back.
LD: How much of that training and experience carries over into your work now? Do you have an example of a case you took that was, perhaps, outside your comfort zone?
ASL: One example is a case I took on involving the Adult Survivors Act on the defense side, which I’d never done before. Especially in that kind of situation, you have to be straight with people. You tell them, "I'm a litigator and I'm sort of a generalist litigator. I do primarily criminal and regulatory and criminal- and regulatory-adjacent cases. I'd say the heartland in my practice, the dead middle of it, is a civil case where you're taking the Fifth Amendment as a complete defense. That's the type of case I defend." And the client was like, "That's OK. I like you. I think you understand what I'm trying to do here, and you can work with me to this." As long as you establish your ground with a client and you start on a page that's open and honest, it's hard to go wrong.
LD: That’s a good segue into your client relationships and the way you practice law. You’ve talked about preserving the client’s power of choice before, for instance. Tell me more about that.
The empowerment of making [the client] the hero of their own story is a tremendous step forward.
ASL: You definitely have more choice in some cases than others, depending on factors such as budget, time and the point at which you took on the case. But ideally, you want to make the client the hero of their story. When you do that, it's just like a key in a lock. Everything falls into place, and they feel the power rising in them. They don't feel chased anymore. Litigation is a terrifying ordeal for most people, whether you're a plaintiff or a defendant. People start wondering why they ever agreed to it. Well, they agreed to it because they needed to tell their story, they needed to be heard and they needed to tell how they got hurt and what can be done to make it right. And I'm telling you, if you do that in the right way, in an honest and complete and forthright way where you own your own mistakes, you'll get relief. It really works, but it takes time.
LD: But as a lawyer, getting the information you need to use that strategy successfully must be really challenging.
ASL: It can be, because people are coming at this with their whole history, their fears, their doubts, their insecurities, their previous bad experiences in litigation. Some people are excellent at litigation, and you know it right away, either because they've done it a million times or they're just people who aren’t bothered by it. They will tell the worst parts of their case in the first meeting. Which makes it a lot easier on the lawyer. Whereas if you hide it, you elide it, it comes out in dribs and drabs. Every lawyer who's been on trial has seen that happen to a witness, and hopefully it wasn't yours, where the bad facts just keep coming out while your client is on the stand, slowly getting destroyed by the things that they didn’t tell their lawyer or that their lawyer didn’t figure out. If there’s something, the other side is going to find it.
LD: Knowing all the facts on the front end is vital.
ASL: Definitely. The empowerment of making them the hero of their own story is a tremendous step forward. And it may not necessarily lead to trial or winning a trial. It can also make your client realize, "You know what? I've had enough of this. Can we work this out?" And then you go from there. Having the authentic relationship with your client that leads to that sort of open dialogue is foundational. I have to love my clients because if I don’t love them, no one else will. That’s a fundamental principle of legal practice: If you don’t believe in the person sitting next to you, the jury’s certainly not going to.
