Prosecutors allege $70,000 in profits from five client matters, including Paramount-Warner deal
Federal prosecutors on Thursday charged Chetram Balli, a longtime clerical employee at the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore, with trading on confidential information he gained about major deals involving the firm’s clients.
Balli was arrested Thursday morning in Queens and was expected to appear Thursday afternoon in federal court in Brooklyn.
Prosecutors alleged that from April 2025 to October 2026, Balli made $70,000 on trades related to five client matters, including Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. Cravath represented Paramount in that deal.
Balli, 54 years old, has worked at Cravath as a document processing specialist since 1989, prosecutors said. His job included creating and revising legal documents and submitting filings through a Securities and Exchange Commission reporting system, prosecutors said. Such work sometimes gave him access to confidential information about client deals, according to prosecutors.
A lawyer for Balli could not be identified. A Cravath spokeswoman said the firm was cooperating with authorities and that there were no allegations of wrongdoing by the firm.
Prosecutors said Balli traded in shares of at least 20 companies, including Nvidia, during the period in question, but investigators had not determined whether Cravath was involved in transactions related to some of those companies.
The charges follow other insider-trading scandals at leading law firms, where lawyers and support staff routinely have access to nonpublic information about client matters.
Earlier this year, federal prosecutors in Boston charged about 30 people, including lawyers formerly at Wachtell Lipton and Goodwin Procter, with taking part in a decadelong insider trading scheme. The firms were not accused of wrongdoing.
In 2011, corporate lawyer Matthew Kluger, who worked at top firms including Cravath, pleaded guilty to participating in a long-running insider trading scheme that prosecutors said generated more than $37 million in profits. Kluger was sentenced to 12 years in prison.