Winston Y. Chan is Of Counsel in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher’s San Francisco office. He is an experienced trial and appellate attorney, and is a member of the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations, Securities Enforcement, FDA and Health Care, Life Sciences, FCPA, and Antitrust Practice Groups. In 2014, Mr. Chan was named in Law360 as one of just five nationwide “Rising Stars” in White Collar under the age of 40 “whose legal accomplishments belie their age.”
From 2003 to 2011, Mr. Chan served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York, where he investigated and prosecuted a wide range of matters as part of that office’s Business and Securities Fraud Section, including False Claims Act violations, health care fraud, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, hedge fund improprieties, insider trading, accounting fraud, market manipulation, and fraudulent offerings of securities. He received the U.S. Attorney’s Excellence in Criminal Litigation Award, as well as commendations from the SEC and FBI, for his successful jury trial conviction of an investment banking executive charged with federal securities fraud in connection with a kickback scheme. That case was part of a widespread investigation into the securities lending industry that resulted in over 30 convictions of individuals from more than a dozen investment banks and broker dealers.
Mr. Chan additionally prosecuted cases in the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, where he handled matters involving Italian, Eastern European and Asian criminal enterprises. The Attorney General awarded Mr. Chan the Department of Justice’s Distinguished Service Award for his “exemplary and historic work” in obtaining the jury trial conviction of the acting boss of the Bonanno organized crime family for racketeering, murder, narcotics trafficking and loansharking charges. Mr. Chan also led investigations that dismantled entire criminal organizations, including the two largest Eastern European crime groups then operating within the United States.
As a senior prosecutor, Mr. Chan served in a number of supervisory roles at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, including as Health Care Fraud Coordinator. In that capacity, he oversaw all qui tam and whistleblower investigations involving allegations of False Claims Act violations, kickbacks, misbranding and off-label promotion by pharmaceutical, biotechnology and medical diagnostic companies, among others. Mr. Chan also served as Deputy Chief of the General Crimes section, where he supervised and trained all first-year AUSAs in their investigation, prosecution and trial of federal offenses ranging from fraud to violent crime. By the conclusion of his tenure with the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mr. Chan had trained approximately half of the 83 line prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York.
As an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Mr. Chan tried eight jury trials and briefed and argued nine federal appeals – all to successful verdicts and rulings. While a federal prosecutor, Mr. Chan additionally taught a clinical course at Columbia Law School on the principles of federal prosecution and a first-year lawyering course at Fordham University School of Law.
Mr. Chan earned his undergraduate degree, magna cum laude, from Yale University, and his Juris Doctor from Yale Law School, where he was on the Yale Law Journal and president of the Pacific Islander, Asian and Native American Law Students’ Association. Following law school, Mr. Chan served as a law clerk for the Honorable Leonard B. Sand of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and then for the Honorable Chester J. Straub of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
He speaks conversational Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese.
