Barbara A. Martinez is a partner in Holland & Knight's Miami office and a member of the firm's Global Compliance and Investigations Team and Asset Recovery Team. After a distinguished career handling an array of complex litigation matters as a federal prosecutor, Ms. Martinez focuses her practice on internal corporate investigations, corporate compliance and training, asset recovery and white collar criminal defense. She also has receivership experience.
In her 21 years with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Ms. Martinez tried numerous complex trials in federal court in South Florida and many bench trials in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. She now represents individuals and companies targeted for investigations and prosecutions at the local, state and federal level.
Drawing on her experience in leading investigations, Ms. Martinez represents corporations and individuals in internal investigations as well as in compliance and due diligence matters involving fraud, money laundering, human trafficking and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). She develops policies, compliance programs and corporate due diligence protocols related to these subject areas. She routinely conducts anti-trafficking and anti-money laundering training for companies, educators, financial institutions and medical professionals in the U.S. and abroad.
Ms. Martinez is also highly knowledgeable on victim rights laws and certain cybercrimes, including child pornography, cyberstalking, online threats and sextortion. She advises companies, educational institutions and organizations about risk management relating to safety and threat management policies, online electronic data collection and storage, privacy and victim issues related to business practices and supply chain management.
Prior to joining Holland & Knight, Ms. Martinez served as the chief of the Special Prosecutions Section at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida in Miami. In this capacity, she supervised federal prosecutors who handled cases involving international and domestic human trafficking, money laundering; cybercrimes, including online child exploitation, sextortion, extortion and cyberstalking; international kidnappings; and other transnational crimes. She also conducted numerous investigations and tried cases.
Ms. Martinez worked as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Economic Crimes Section at the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami, where she primarily focused on healthcare fraud prosecutions. Additionally, she prosecuted cases involving mail and wire fraud, computer intrusion, identity theft and credit card fraud. Before joining the U.S. Attorney's Office, she served as a DOJ trial attorney for the Fraud Section of the Criminal Division in Washington, D.C., through the Attorney General's Honors Program. In this role, Ms. Martinez prosecuted complex white collar cases involving bank fraud, mail and wire fraud, student loan fraud, telemarketing fraud, false statements and obstruction of justice.
Some of Ms. Martinez's notable federal trials include:
- a six-week international sex trafficking case
- a month-long sex trafficking case involving 50 adult victims from across the U.S.
- a two-week, multimillion-dollar healthcare fraud case against the owner of a medical clinic
- a three-week, multimillion-dollar healthcare fraud case against two physicians, and
- a nine-day, multimillion-dollar U.S. Department of Education fraud case against the owners of a vocational school
At the U.S. Attorney's Office, Ms. Martinez served as the human trafficking coordinator and the Project Safe Childhood coordinator for the Southern District of Florida for more than a decade. As the coordinator for these programs, Ms. Martinez spearheaded coordination efforts among law enforcement, prosecutors, non-governmental organizations and the private sector nationwide and globally to more effectively prevent and identify human trafficking and online child exploitation, as well as to investigate and successfully prosecute cases. She routinely collaborated with foreign governments, private industries, non-governmental organizations and community members to assist in these efforts and raise public awareness. In addition, she was a member of DOJ's Child Exploitation Nationwide Investigation Advisory Committee for about six years until she transitioned to private practice.
Ms. Martinez also has extensive experience teaching and conducting training courses. She conducted and created anti-trafficking and anti-money laundering training sessions for law enforcement, prosecutors, victim advocates and members of the financial industry throughout the U.S. and in foreign countries, including Mexico, The Bahamas, St. Lucia, Barbados, Portugal, Latvia, Poland, Bulgaria and Iceland. She taught trial advocacy to law enforcement and prosecutors in Chile and a session about computer crimes to representatives of financial institutions in Peru. She also taught judges from India about handling human trafficking cases at the Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI) Institute in Prague, in a program sponsored in partnership by the Federal Judicial Center for United States federal courts, the National Judicial Academy of India, and the CEELI. In addition, Ms. Martinez teaches a human trafficking seminar at the University of Miami School of Law.