Eugene Illovsky is a nationally-recognized former prosecutor with decades of broad experience. He has tried many criminal and civil cases before juries and judges and has argued more than a dozen cases before the U. S. Court of Appeals. He provides crisis management advice to emerging, established public, and private companies. He conducts internal investigations for companies and boards in matters involving securities violations, accounting irregularities, regulatory compliance, intellectual property theft, employee misconduct, export controls, and antitrust issues.
Eugene has represented senior executives in corporate internal investigations, as well as in grand jury, SEC and FINRA investigations, and complex civil litigation. He provides advice to company counsel, financial and operating executives, founders, and board members at large and emerging businesses in many areas of compliance, including antitrust, anti-money laundering, supply chain and diversion controls, logistics, and export controls.
Eugene serves as a Settlement Conference Officer on the San Francisco Superior Court’s Mandatory Settlement Conference Panel. He was co-chair of the Business Crimes, Investigations and Corporate Compliance Committee of the ABA Business Law Section in 2021-22. He has served on the Oakland and San Jose Trial Panels and the Appellate Panel under the federal Criminal Justice Act. Eugene served a three-year term (2013-2015) as a Commissioner of the State Bar of California’s Commission on Judicial Nominees Evaluation (JNE). He is a former Visiting Lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Law.
Before forming Illovsky & Calia LLP, Eugene had previously almost twenty years as a partner in the major international law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP. Eugene served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of California (Sacramento) from 1992-1998, where he investigated and prosecuted a wide array of white-collar crimes, including investment frauds, money laundering, political corruption, intellectual property crimes, immigration fraud and tax evasion. For his work as an AUSA, he received a number of distinctions. Among them:
- Director’s Award for Superior Performance from the Attorney General for a series of complex insurance fraud prosecutions
- Commendations from the FBI Director and the Attorney General
- Special Commendation from the Office of the Inspector General for his work on citizenship testing program fraud
- Commendation from Office of the Inspector General, Department of Agriculture, for prosecuting federal program fraud
- Appointment to the Department of Justice’s Campaign Finance Task Force to investigate allegations of illegal fundraising during the 1996 presidential election
- Appointment as Computer and Telecommunications Coordinator, the computer crime liaison to Main Justice for the Eastern District of California
Eugene has been named to the Northern California Super Lawyers list as one of the top attorneys in Northern California for 2012 – 2023. He has been named in Best Lawyers® since 2012 as one of the best white collar criminal defense practitioners and, for 2024, also recognized for Commercial Litigation. Eugene was named by Best Lawyers® as the 2021, 2019 and 2017 Criminal Defense: White Collar “Lawyer of the Year” in Oakland. He was selected by Global Investigations Review’s independent research as one of the world’s leading investigations lawyers and is named in its International Who’s Who of Investigations Lawyers & Forensic Experts 2014. He has been recommended as a leading lawyer by Legal 500 US 2009 and 2014 for white-collar criminal defense.