Page 15 - OAD 2023 First Monday Journal

Sarah Coyne, a partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, is a Co-Head of the White Collar
Defense, Regulatory and Investigations practice. She handles a wide range of civil and
criminal white collar matters, as well as internal investigations, and has experience
across industry sectors, with an emphasis on financial institutions. She is recognized
among the top lawyers in the field by Chambers USA, Legal 500, Benchmark Litiga-
tion, and Global Investigations Review, and has three times been named “White Collar
Crime Lawyer of the Year” at Euromoney’s Americas Women in Business Law Awards.

Sarah was a federal prosecutor for 14 years, first in the District of New Jersey, then in
the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York, where she served as Chief of the Business and
Securities Fraud Section and oversaw a team of 15 prosecutors working on white collar criminal matters.
In these roles, she prosecuted or supervised a number of high-profile cases, including those involving the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, securities and investment fraud, and healthcare fraud.

Sarah is a frequent speaker on white collar and related topics such as the FCPA. For many years, she
served as a Lecturer of Law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and taught a course on white
collar crime.

Soumya Dayananda is a partner in Willkie’s Litigation Department, where she is
a member of the Investigations & Enforcement Practice. She is based in Willkie’s
Washington, D.C., office. Prior to joining the firm in 2023, Soumya served as a Senior
Investigative Counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee
to Investigate The Attack on the United States Capitol, where she led a team of
attorneys investigating the law enforcement and military response on January 6. She
also previously served as a Senior Investigative Counsel at the U.S. Senate Homeland
Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC), the Senate’s top oversight Committee, for
Chairman Gary Peters (MI-D), where she led high-profile bipartisan investigations.

Soumya served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York (EDNY) for more than a
decade, where she held leadership positions in the International Narcotics and Money Laundering Section
overseeing complex international narcotics and money laundering investigations and prosecutions. During
her career, she served as lead trial counsel on dozens of trials, including numerous high-profile RICO cases.
She began her career as an Assistant D.A. in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

Soumya taught a Persuasion and Advocacy course at Seton Hall University, and has served as a guest
lecturer at clinical programs at NYU School of Law, Brooklyn Law School, and City University of New York.
In 2015, Soumya received the U.S. Department of Justice Director’s Award for Superior Performance by
a Litigation Group and the Federal Law Enforcement Foundation’s Federal Prosecutor of the Year award,
and in 2018, the Society of Asian Federal Officers Prosecutor of the Year award. She is a three-time recip-
ient of the True American Hero Award from the Federal Drug Agents’ Foundation.

13