Martha Boersch is one of the premier white collar defense and trial lawyers in the country. She has decades of experience in complex criminal and civil litigation in federal and state courts and is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. Martha has represented clients in numerous federal jury and bench trials and has argued more than a dozen cases in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. She has conducted internal corporate investigations for companies in a variety of industries and provides strategic advice to companies, executives, and individuals dealing with grand jury and other government investigations. Martha has deep experience in a broad range of white collar charges, including mail and wire fraud, money laundering, economic espionage, computer fraud and abuse, racketeering, foreign bribery, antitrust, and federal forfeitures. She also has worked extensively international criminal matters, particularly related to former Soviet Bloc countries, such as Russia, Ukraine and Romania.
Before forming Boersch & Illovsky LLP, Martha spent several years as a litigation partner at the international law firm of Jones Day, founded her own firm, and then founded Boersch Shapiro LLP. Martha had previously served for twelve years as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Northern District of California. During her career as a federal prosecutor, the U.S. Attorney chose her to be the Chief of the Organized Crime Strike Force (2002-2004) and the Chief of the Securities Fraud Unit (2001-2002). She was the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s International Security Coordinator and spent a summer in Moscow for the Department of Justice’s Office of International Affairs. In 2009, Martha was awarded the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award, the Department of Justice’s second highest award for employee performance, for her work on a complex international money laundering prosecution involving the former Prime Minister of the Ukraine.
Martha has been named to the Northern California Super Lawyers list as one of the top attorneys in Northern California for 2006 – 2019, and has been identified by the Daily Journal as one of California’s Top Women Litigators. Martha was named as one of the world’s foremost white collar crime lawyers in Who’s Who Legal Business Crime Defense: Corporates for 2018 and 2019. She has been named in Best Lawyers® since 2012 as one of the best white collar criminal defense practitioners and was recognized as the 2020 Criminal Defense: White Collar “Lawyer of the Year” in Oakland. She received the California Lawyer’s Lawyer of the Year award in 2004.
Martha was recently reappointed by the Chief Judge to serve on the Northern District’s Criminal Practice Committee and she has served a lawyer representative to the Northern District of California. She has served for many years on the Criminal Justice Act panel in San Francisco and Oakland, representing indigent clients. She is a frequent speaker on white collar and international criminal defense topics.
Education
University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), J.D., 1986
Editor, California Law Review
Order of the Coif
University of Oregon, 1979, B.A.
Phi Beta Kappa
Clerkship
Law Clerk to the Honorable James M. Fitzgerald, Chief Judge
United States District Court for the District of Alaska, 1986-1988
Former member of the San Francisco Chapter.