Mr. Lew specializes in criminal defense with extensive federal and state criminal defense trial experience, emphasizing business-related prosecutions before the federal courts and complex white-collar matters. Mr. Lew was born in Oakland and received his undergraduate education at the University of California at Berkeley, graduating in three years in 1971 with a degree in Criminology. He attended law school at the University of California’s Boalt Hall of Law, receiving his Juris Doctor in 1974. In his 34 years of criminal defense practice, Mr. Lew has defended clients charged with crimes involving multi-million dollar allegations of tax, bankruptcy, bank and wire fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, illegal structuring of monetary transactions, environmental law violations, sex offenses and drug offenses. He has extensive experience with respect to state and federal asset forfeitures, U.S. Customs violations, Department of Commerce Export Controls, Health Care fraud and prosecutions for intellectual property infringement. Mr. Lew holds an AV Preeminent Lawyer rating, the highest rating for attorney competence and ethics by the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory, a national compilation of attorneys. AVENUE magazine identified Mr. Lew as one of the 500 most influential Asian Americans in 1998. He is a contributing author to "California Criminal Law Procedure and Practice", published by the California Continuing Education of the Bar [CEB] and was a co-founder of the Asian Law Caucus, Inc., a leading non-profit civil rights organization.