Jeffrey Knox

Jeffrey Knox, former chief of the Justice Department's fraud section, left the DOJ to work at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in 2014 as a partner.

Knox graduated as a bachelor of science magna cum laude from the University of Arizona in 1996, and earned his law degree in 1999 from Northwestern University School of Law. He was a Simpson Thacher associate for four years before heading to the DOJ in 2003.

After studying, Knox served as the head of the violent crime and terrorism unit in the US Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York. Knox joined the 14-lawyer team in 2005 and took over as its head in 2008. In that capacity, he supervised and handled a lengthy list of terrorism cases, including the high-profile prosecution of Najibullah Zazi. Since 2008, many of the successful terror convictions in the US have come out of the Eastern District of New York.

In July 2010, Knox became senior litigation counsel on the criminal division fraud section's FCPA team. As deputy head and head of the fraud section, Knox supervised more than 100 prosecutions, including the department's probes of alleged Libor and forex manipulation.

Knox oversaw multi-million dollar FCPA settlements with Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer. While fraud section chief he also prosecuted BP, Transocean and Halliburton, securing US$4 billion in criminal penalties for crimes related to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.