Christopher Wray

Christopher Wray is a litigation partner in the firm’s Washington, D.C., and Atlanta offices. Mr. Wray chairs the King & Spalding Special Matters and Government Investigations Practice Group, which represents companies, audit and special committees, and individuals in a variety of white-collar criminal and regulatory enforcement matters, parallel civil litigation, and internal corporate investigations. Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Wray served from 2003 to 2005 as the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Criminal Division, having been nominated by the President and confirmed by the U.S. Senate’s unanimous consent for that position. Mr. Wray helped lead the Department’s efforts to address the wave of corporate fraud scandals and restore integrity to U.S. financial markets. He served on the President’s Corporate Fraud Task Force and oversaw the Enron Task Force and other major fraud investigations, both around the country and internationally. As the Criminal Division’s head, Mr. Wray led investigations, prosecutions, and policy development in nearly all areas of federal criminal law, including securities fraud, healthcare fraud, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and trade sanctions violations, bank secrecy and money laundering offenses, public corruption, intellectual property piracy and cybercrime, and RICO. Mr. Wray was also integral to the DOJ’s response to the 9/11 attacks and played a key role in the oversight of legal and operational actions in the continuing war on terrorism. Mr. Wray first joined the DOJ’s leadership as Associate Deputy Attorney General in May 2001 and was soon appointed the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General in September of the same year, with oversight responsibilities spanning the full Department. From 1997 to 2001, Mr. Wray served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia. As a prosecutor in Atlanta, he handled a wide variety of federal jury trials, grand jury investigations and appeals as lead counsel. Since returning to the firm in late 2005, Mr. Wray has led investigation matters involving U.S. Attorneys’ Offices in over twenty different districts around the country and nearly every litigating division of the Justice Department, typically also involving parallel proceedings by regulatory agencies and parallel class action or qui tam whistleblower litigation. He served as a law clerk to Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1992 to 1993. Mr. Wray graduated, cum laude, from Yale University in 1989 and received his law degree in 1992 from Yale Law School, where he served as Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal.