News & Insights

Lightfoot Partner Brandon Essig Speaks at the University of Alabama School of Law

February 6, 2018

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (February 7, 2018) – Lightfoot, Franklin & White LLC partner Brandon Essig spoke to law students in a corporate compliance course at the University of Alabama on January 25. The class is taught by Pamela Pierson, a longtime criminal law professor at Alabama who focuses on white collar crime.

Essig spoke to students about how various regulators view institutional compliance programs with an emphasis on the U.S. Department of Justice’s past investigations of corporations and NCAA enforcement actions against colleges and universities. Essig spoke to the class with a friend who is an in-house counsel at a large government contracting company. Together they provided the students with factual scenarios based on their broad experience conducting investigations in a variety of contexts.

“It was such a privilege to spend the afternoon with these bright law students,” said Essig. “Compliance is a growing sector of legal practice, and it is important to provide students with a real-world perspective of the day-to-day work in this area.”

Essig joined Lightfoot after nearly eight years as a federal prosecutor for the Department of Justice in the Middle District of Alabama. He tried multiple felony jury trials each year, and he handled investigations that included public corruption, money laundering and various fraud cases. Prior to his time at the DOJ, Essig was a Captain in the U.S. Marine Corps where he worked as a prosecutor and deployed with an infantry unit to Fallujah, Iraq.