David Debold joined the Washington, D.C. office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in 2003. He practices in the Litigation Department, and is a member of the firm’s Appellate and Constitutional Law, Securities Litigation and White Collar Defense and Investigations Practice Groups.
Since joining the firm, Mr. Debold has represented numerous individuals and businesses in a wide variety of matters, including: major SEC enforcement actions and investigations involving accounting irregularities, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act allegations, and books and records issues; large-scale corporate internal investigations for Fortune 50 companies (including independent investigations for audit committees of boards of directors); federal criminal investigations and prosecutions involving a number of federal offenses in the environmental, tax, mortgage loan fraud, securities fraud, stock options backdating and money laundering areas; securities class actions; federal appeals across the spectrum of civil and criminal cases; petitions for writs of certiorari filed in the United States Supreme Court in both civil and criminal cases; and merits appeals in the United States Supreme Court. Mr. Debold also has significant experience in employment litigation including defending against whistleblower retaliation claims brought under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Debold served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Detroit, Michigan, where he had a distinguished career in government service as a member of the office’s Criminal Trial and Appellate Divisions. In his years as a trial lawyer for the United States Attorney’s Office, he directed more than 100 grand jury investigations and brought to trial over a dozen felony cases, including a multi-million dollar construction loan fraud, a large-scale investment scam and the attempted murder of a federal agent. During his tenure with the government he also served as Special Counsel to the Sentencing Commission.
Throughout his career, Mr. Debold has argued more than 85 cases in the United States Court of Appeals and briefed more than 150 appeals. He recently successfully briefed and argued a federal appeal for a pro bono client, convincing the Court to remand for a possible new trial in state court based on the government’s improper use of race in the jury selection process. Mr. Debold also has extensive experience drafting dispositive and other substantive motions at the trial level in both state and federal courts. He has been assigned responsibility for overseeing motions practice in a major securities class action and accounting malpractice case involved demands for damages in excess of $1 billion.
Mr. Debold has lectured frequently at national conferences on criminal law and appellate issues. He is chair of the United States Sentencing Commission's Practitioners Advisory Group, which provides input from private practitioners on a variety of sentencing-related issues including proposed amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and legislative initiatives. In 2007 he was selected by the American Bar Association and Aspen Publications to serve as editor of annual revisions and substantial updates to the two-volume treatise, "Practice Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines," a comprehensive sentencing guide for federal practitioners. In 2008 he worked with his fellow Gibson Dunn attorneys, in collaboration with attorneys from several other firms, on drafting chapters analyzing sentencing and plea practices in federal antitrust cases, in a new ABA handbook for practitioners. He also recently co-authored an article in the Federal Sentencing Reporter on Non-Prosecution and Deferred-Prosecution Agreements entitled “Consistency in NPAs and DPAs.” And he has written numerous articles on developments in federal sentencing law at the Supreme Court level, as well as updates on Department of Justice policies in the investigation and prosecution of corporations and other organizations.
Mr. Debold graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1985, and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Cornelia G. Kennedy of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.