Chris Morvillo, a partner at law firm Clifford Chance in New York who successfully defended British tech tycoon Mike Lynch in a criminal trial that ended in June, was among those killed in the sinking of a luxury yacht earlier this week. Morvillo was 59. The deaths of Morvillo and his wife, Neda, were confirmed in a statement by Clifford Chance.
“We are heartbroken at the tragic passing of our partner, Christopher Morvillo, and his wife, Neda,” the firm said. “We are deeply saddened and still coming to terms with this terrible loss.” Lynch was also among those killed when the yacht sank in a severe storm off the coast of Italy on Monday with 22 people on board.
A partner at the firm since 2011, Morvillo had held broad oversight of Lynch’s two-continent legal defense against charges that he duped Hewlett Packard Co. into overpaying for his software firm, Autonomy Corp. Lynch’s acquittal in June, following a trial in San Francisco, vindicated Morvillo’s strategy of highlighting flaws in HP’s acquisition of Autonomy.
After the acquittal, Morvillo said that the verdict “closes the book” on the long effort to pin the blame on his client. One unresolved chapter in the dispute, however, was a civil case in the UK that resulted, in 2022, in a judge ruling that Lynch had fraudulently boosted the value of his company. In that case, the judge was still determining what damages Lynch would have to pay.
Before becoming a white-collar-crime defense lawyer, Morvillo worked as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, where he assisted in the criminal investigations following the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He was also a lead prosecutor in the case of Lynne Stewart, the civil-rights defense attorney known for taking on controversial and infamous clients. Stewart was convicted in 2005 on charges of helping a terrorist client communicate with his followers.
Morvillo graduated from Fordham University School of Law in 1992 before starting as an attorney the following year. His father, Robert Morvillo, was a prominent New York defense lawyer whose clients included Martha Stewart when she was facing obstruction-of-justice charges related to illegal stock trading. With assistance from Daniel Taub.
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