"White-Collar" crimes are non-violent crimes, involving real or potential financial gain to the people or companies that commit them. Such crimes are generally committed using papers (letters and documents), telephones, and computers, rather than by actual physical appropriation of money or property.

Federal white-collar include health-care fraud, tax fraud, wire fraud, and mail fraud, to name just a few. The heart of a fraud prosecution is the allegation that a person has intentionally obtained something of value by making false representations. For example, in a telemarketing fraud case the government's allegation is often that a person used a telephone to get people to send him money by promising something that he did not intend to deliver. In a health-care fraud case, the government might allege that a doctor or clinic billed an insurance company for medical treatment that was not provided.

Allegations of white-collar crime are often accompanied by accusations of money laundering -- conducting financial transactions with the proceeds of criminal activity, intending to promote the illegal activity. The government has historically done this because the penalties for money laundering are more severe than those for fraud; after the 2001 amendments to the sentencing guidelines, which increased penalties for fraud, the disparity between money laundering and fraud sentences diminished, but the guidelines numbers for money laundering are still three or four points higher than those for fraud. At the wrong point in the sentencing table, these extra points could conceivably double a person's sentence.

White-collar crime cases are paperwork-intensive. The government will often have many thousands of pages of documents to be used as evidence against a person. Two things are particularly important for a lawyer to do in such a case: first, to simplify -- to focus on what he is trying to keep the government from proving (typically either the act that is alleged or the fraudulent intent of that act); and second, to organize -- to get the voluminous documents in a state that allows him to retrieve any important piece of paper in an instant.

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Mark.