Criminalizing Legal Work in Securities Cases: US v. Saltsman

We have a post below on US v. Saltsman, a criminal indictment alleging a scheme to secretly issue "discounted PIPE shares" to two defendants via nominees.  Once the PIPEs were announced, the share prices of the relevant companies fell.  The shares issued in the PIPEs were used to cover short positons, allegedly earning the defendants $16 million in profit.  

Ordinarily, this would not be a topic of much interest to this Blog.  Of note, however, the indictment included Martin Weisberg, a partmer with Baker & McKenzie (but has since resigned).  The indictment mostly attributes to Weisberg the role of reviewer and scrivener, although there are allegations of false statements made to the SEC in response to comment letters.  In any event, as the post written by Vaughn Marshall indicates, the case against Weisberg is not entirely clear.