David Patton

Practice Areas

Public Interest Litigation; Trials; White Collar Criminal Defense

Career

David Patton is a highly accomplished trial attorney who has represented hundreds of clients in federal and state courts during his 25-year career. David joined the firm after serving as Executive Director and Attorney-in-Chief of the Federal Defenders of New York for twelve years, in which time he oversaw the work of federal public defenders in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, with offices located in Manhattan, Brooklyn, White Plains, and Islip.

David has served as lead or co-counsel in dozens of federal trials. He has achieved outright acquittals in more than half of the federal cases he has personally tried to a jury. Those cases span a wide range of charges, including fraud, insider trading, drug trafficking, firearms, and counterfeiting. In 2025, David’s highlights included negotiating the dismissal of an indictment in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) for an attorney charged with bribery and honest services fraud and successfully trying another case to a jury in the SDNY in which the client was only convicted of a single, lesser count in a cryptocurrency case alleging money laundering, sanctions violations, and unlicensed operation of a money transmitting business. And in the District of Connecticut, he achieved a highly favorable sentencing outcome for a former oil and gas trader in connection with Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) charges. He continues to represent other clients indicted in the SDNY on fraud charges related to the financial services and cryptocurrency industries.

David is a Fellow in the American College of Trial Lawyers and a member of the American Law Institute. Chambers and Legal 500 recognize David for his white collar defense work, and Benchmark Litigation named him a “Litigation Star.” David has also been selected for inclusion in Lawdragon’s “500 Leading Litigators in America” and “500 Leading Lawyers in America” lists. He is the recipient of numerous professional awards and honors, including the 2023 Norman S. Ostrow Award from the New York Council of Defense Lawyers, the 2020 Emory Buckner Medal from the Federal Bar Council, the 2018 Judge Robert Louis Cohen Award for Professional Excellence from the New York Criminal Bar Association, the 2017 Champion of the Community Award from Gideon’s Promise, and the 2013 Thurgood Marshall Award for Outstanding Criminal Practitioner from the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

In addition to his work as a trial lawyer and running the Federal Defenders of New York, David has been a prominent national figure in efforts to reform the criminal justice system. He has testified before Congress on multiple occasions, served as the chair of the federal defender legislative committee, and was a member of the national committee that guides policy on behalf of federal defenders. He has published scholarly articles on a variety of criminal justice topics in the Yale Law Journal, Cornell Law Review, Emory Law Journal, and Cardozo Law Review, among others.

From 2002 to 2008, David worked at the Federal Defenders of New York as a trial attorney in the Manhattan office. He left the office to pursue a career in academia, first as an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Alabama, where he taught Criminal Law, and then at Stanford Law School, where he created its first trial-level criminal defense clinic and was offered a tenure-track position. He left Stanford in order to return to the Federal Defenders of New York as Executive Director. Between October 2022 and March 2023, David successfully represented a client in the first federal death penalty trial under the Biden Administration, which resulted in a life sentence.

David is currently an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law where he teaches a seminar on legal ethics. He began his career as an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Claude Hilton, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. He received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served as editor of the Virginia Law Review. David received his B.A. from the University of Virginia.