Prosecutors say employee netted $70,000 in profits related to client matters including Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery
By Corinne Ramey
Federal prosecutors on Thursday charged a longtime clerical employee at law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore with trading on confidential information he gained about major deals related to the white-shoe firm's clients.
The employee, Chetram Balli, was arrested Thursday morning in Queens and appeared in federal court in Brooklyn, N.Y., Thursday afternoon. Prosecutors alleged that from April 2025 to October 2026, Balli made $70,000 on trades related to five client matters including Paramount's acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Cravath represented Paramount in that deal.
A lawyer for Balli didn't respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for Cravath said the firm was cooperating with authorities and that there were no allegations of wrongdoing by the firm.
Balli, 54 years old, has worked at Cravath as a document processing specialist since 1989, prosecutors said. His job included creating and revising legal documents and submitting filings through a Securities and Exchange Commission reporting system, they said. Such work sometimes gave him access to confidential information about client deals.
Prosecutors said that Balli traded in shares of at least 20 companies, including Nvidia, during the time period in question, but investigators hadn't determined whether Cravath was involved in transactions related to some of those companies.
Leading law firms, where lawyers and support staff routinely have access to nonpublic information, have faced other insider-trading scandals, including a major one earlier this year. Federal prosecutors in Boston charged about 30 people, including lawyers formerly at Wachtell Lipton and Goodwin Procter, with a decadelong insider trading scheme. The firms weren't accused of wrongdoing.
In 2011, corporate lawyer Matthew Kluger, who worked at top firms including Cravath, pleaded guilty to participating in a long-running insider trading scheme that prosecutors said generated more than $37 million in profits. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.