Daniel Fridman

Daniel Fridman takes the cases where the most is at stake, when a company's survival or a person's liberty is on the line. Companies, their founders and executives, and individuals under government scrutiny retain him for their toughest matters, from commercial and control disputes and contested buyouts to the cross-border investigations and prosecutions that decide whether a business survives, who runs it, and whether a client walks free. Chambers USA has ranked him Band 1 for White-Collar Crime and Government Investigations in Florida every year since 2021.

Fridman worked at the highest levels of the US government and at one of the largest global law firms before co-founding Fridman Fels & Soto in 2019. He served as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States and as the Justice Department's Special Counsel for Health Care Fraud. He was a partner at White & Case, where he established the firm's Latin America investigations practice.

Litigation & False Claims Act Cases

When the dispute is bet-the-company, clients want a litigator who has won the hardest ones. Fridman won a dismissal with prejudice for American Express Bank International in a high-profile defamation suit brought by its former CEO over the bank's anti-money-laundering settlement with the DOJ, ending the case at the pleadings stage, a rare outcome on a first motion. In a private-equity arbitration, he represented a large health care company's founder against the fund pressing to force a buyout at a $2 billion valuation. In the Oro Negro litigation, opposite Quinn Emanuel, he pursued US discovery and asset tracing for bondholders who held nearly $1 billion in bonds and alleged that executives had diverted tens of millions of dollars from the entities that owned five Mexican oil-drilling rigs.

Mr. Fridman was called on to represent the Department of Health of a state under investigation by the Department of Justice under the False Claims Act for allegedly using fraudulent means to mask a high error rate in distributing benefits. In a False Claim Act lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice, Mr. Fridman represented the former CEO of Patient Care America in an alleged $80 million compounding pharmacy fraud involving pain and scar creams provided to Tricare beneficiaries. When the DOJ later sought to prosecute the CEO, after the company’s VP and marketers were convicted and sentenced to over 10 years imprisonment, the CEO wound up with a sentence of six months as a result of the efforts of Mr Fridman and Mr. Fels.

Internal Investigations

His internal investigations yield results. Toshiba International Corporation came to him with a suspicion and little else—a facilities manager who acted strangely after a server-room fire and an insurance adjuster who could not understand why the remediation work cost so much. Fridman opened an internal investigation and reconstructed a decade of bid-rigging and bribery. More than $100 million ran through rigged construction contracts, with fake bids supplied by construction companies and bribes paid to the facilities manager in cash, gold and silver bars, guns, jewelry, luxury watches, and real estate moved through shell companies. The scheme cost Toshiba more than $80 million before Mr. Fridman uncovered it. Working with his former colleagues at White & Case, Fridman led the investigation, filed an aggressive civil RICO suit against the construction companies and facilities manager in Houston, and won a preliminary injunction freezing ill-gotten assets. After hpresenting the documents and deposition testimony to the DOJ and the FBI, the government opened an investigation leading to guilty pleas and imprisonment of the construction-company owners. As a result, Toshiba was able to recover losses from the facilities manager and reached confidential settlements with the construction companies.

Cross-Border White-Collar Defense

Mr. Fridman defended Jeffrey Himmel, the Miami business owner whose gold-import company was drawn into the NTR Metals prosecution, the largest precious-metals money-laundering case in US history and the subject of the book Dirty Gold by Miami Herald reporter Jay Weaver. Mr. Himmel was never charged.

Fridman led an accounting-fraud investigation into a French company's Brazilian subsidiary, uncovering massive earnings manipulations committed just before the subsidiary's US IPO. The investigation included the review of nearly one million Portuguese-language documents, with dozens of lawyers and forensic accountants, and a parallel shadow forensic-accounting investigation. Despite resulting in a $100 million restatement for financial results, the SEC closed its investigation with no enforcement action citing the thoroughness of the investigation.

He has represented companies and executives tied to the largest corruption cases in the hemisphere, including JBS USA in the corruption investigation arising from Brazil's Operation Car Wash (Operação Lava Jato) and Operation Weak Flesh (Operação Carne Fraca), as well as a company caught up in Argentina's cuadernos (notebooks) bribery scandal. JBS later hired Mr. Fridman to improve its compliance program after the company’s majority shareholder entered into a settlement agreement with authorities in Brazil.

When the Justice Department or the SEC opens a matter that reaches across the US–Latin America border, multinationals and their Latin American law firms call him. Mr. Fridman has conducted cross-border investigations for global insurance companies, e-commerce companies, and pharmaceutical companies, among others.

Fridman is committed to training the next generation of white-collar practitioners in the LatAm region. He established a J-1 visa trainee program at Fridman Fels & Soto, modeled on the one he ran at White & Case, which has so far hosted two lawyers from Argentina and one from Brazil to train and work in the Miami office. He teaches an annual class, in Spanish, at the Universidad Católica de Buenos Aires on compliance, US criminal law, and internal investigations, and he has spoken frequently across Latin America.

The Legal 500 calls him "insanely smart" and "an expert in cross-border issues," and Chambers Latin America describes him as "a real go-to for anything involving Latin America … really masterful in this field." He works in English and Spanish, with a working knowledge of Portuguese.

Public Service & Pro Bono

Fridman has had a lifelong passion for public service and sees the practice of law as an extension of it. He began as a federal judicial law clerk for the Honorable Alan S. Gold, joined the Justice Department as a federal prosecutor in Miami, and then went to serve at Main Justice in Washington, drawn by the chance to keep communities safe. At the Department, he helped establish Project Safe Childhood, a national initiative to combat online child exploitation and abuse, and helped build a training program for the federal, state, and local members of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Forces that culminated in a national conference.

He was selected as one of about 70 Harry S. Truman Scholars nationally and then graduated from Harvard Law School. He carries that public-service mindset into private practice. He does not drop clients who run out of money—he has always found a way to stay in the case, low bono or pro bono.

For nearly a decade, Mr. Fridman represented a psychologist wrongfully accused and convicted in a massive multi-defendant Medicare-fraud trial and later exonerated by the Eleventh Circuit after it found a lack of any evidence to support her conviction. Mr. Fridman fought for her to be compensated for the three years she served of a nine-year sentence before her release. He also represented a nurse under investigation in a genetic-testing Medicare-fraud matter. The government did not charge the nurse; however, her supervisor received a 20-year sentence for a $192 million Medicare fraud. Today, Mr Fridman lead the firm’s pro bono efforts focusing on democracy protection.