Eric Vandevelde

Eric Vandevelde is a White Collar partner in Gibson Dunn’s Los Angeles office, co-chair of the firm’s AI practice group, and member of its Privacy, Cybersecurity, & Data Innovation practice group. He is a former federal prosecutor, supervised the Cyber & IP Crimes section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California, and has significant first-chair trial experience, both while at the DOJ and in the private sector. He has a deep technical background, with a degree in computer science from Stanford and having worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley and Latin America. Eric has a broad criminal practice—handling trials, internal investigations, enforcement matters, and compliance and advisory work for boards and management—but nearly all of his matters lie at the intersection of technology and the law, and involve cutting edge issues in cybersecurity, AI, theft or misuse of IP, and cryptocurrency. Eric’s clients range from some of the largest technology companies in the world to start-ups, and he has represented household name companies in some of the highest profile, highest stakes cases concerning government demands for personal data and technical assistance in connection with criminal and national security-related investigations.

From 2007 to 2014, Eric served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California. As Deputy Chief of the Cyber & IP Crimes section, Eric supervised one of the nation’s largest teams of federal prosecutors dedicated to investigating and prosecuting computer hacking and IP offenses. He was the lead prosecutor on numerous high-profile cyber-crime investigations, including cases involving corporate espionage, theft of trade secrets, APTs, botnets, ransomware, distributed denial of service attacks, and other sophisticated cyberattacks by nation-state actors. Eric handled the prosecution of several infamous hacking groups that infiltrated government and corporate servers around the world. While at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eric first-chaired complex financial fraud, IP, and cybercrime-related cases, and successfully argued multiple criminal appeals before the Ninth Circuit.

JD, University of California, Los Angeles, 2005. Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Stanford University, 1998.