Women's White Collar Defense Association | Restitution & Forfeiture Panel

We were honored to host Caroline Ciraolo, Margaret Graham and Jillian Berman, three former federal prosecutors who now defend these cases, as our November 2025 White Collar Support Group Tuesday Night Speaker Series presenters. They came to us through the Women’s White Collar Defense Association, which sponsored our October conference. Their subject was restitution and forfeiture, two words used as if they meant the same thing. The panel was open to the public, on Zoom, November 11, 2025. You can watch the full recording above.

Almost nobody understands forfeiture walking into a federal case, and most of us learn what restitution really means only after a judge has ordered it. If you are looking at a plea agreement with a forfeiture paragraph, or explaining to your family why the number is the number, this is your hour. Lawyers too. I have not met many with a firm handle on this.

How forfeiture and restitution differ, and why the numbers often don’t match

Margaret Graham took forfeiture first, and the distinction she drew is what unlocks everything after it. Forfeiture is giving up ill-gotten gains and it is meant to punish. Restitution is meant to make victims whole, and that money is supposed to reach them. One case, two statutes, two different jobs.

That sounds academic until you watch how far apart the two numbers can land. In a straightforward embezzlement they are identical. In an insider trading case, restitution can be zero, because nobody can say who the market’s victim is, or it can be enormous, and the reason it can be enormous is what surprises the room. Then there is the inverted case, where clients lose a billion dollars and forfeiture comes to one year of salary and bonus, because the defendant never touched the billion.

If the charge is money laundering, the government reaches wider still. Margaret explains the theory that lets it take the clean money sitting in the account beside the dirty money, and she does the whole thing, three worked examples, in about fifteen minutes.

Can the government collect forfeiture and restitution on the same money?

This is the question Margaret says she gets constantly. The government holds a $100,000 forfeiture judgment and a $100,000 restitution order over the same $100,000. Does that mean $200,000?

The government is entitled to both forfeiture and restitution separately. They’re different statutes, they serve different purposes, they go to different things. But in practice, what often happens is that it only collects once, and forfeited funds are applied to restitution obligations.

Margaret Graham

The mechanism is an internal Justice Department process called restoration, and the part that matters most is who decides. Not the prosecutors on your case, and they are not permitted to promise you an outcome. Responsibility for this money is split across offices in two cities that do not always talk to each other, which is why both panelists pushed us to learn it ourselves.

Then Jillian Berman said the thing that quieted the room.

In my personal experience, I have never had a situation where the government has applied forfeited assets from my client to a restitution award.

Jillian Berman

Margaret also points to a free public manual that lays out the Justice Department’s own forfeiture and restoration policies. If your lawyer’s forfeiture experience is thin, and she was blunt that plenty is, that is where to start.

How long restitution follows you, and whose legal fees you can owe

Restitution in our cases runs on the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act, and two features of it catch people flat. A court is not permitted to weigh what you can afford when it sets the amount. It can weigh that only when it sets the schedule. And the order stays alive for twenty years from judgment or from release, whichever comes later. That combination explains most of the staggering orders entered in wire fraud, bank fraud and securities fraud cases.

The burden of proof is lower than people assume, and the question tends to arrive at the end of a case and get treated as an afterthought. Whether a claimed victim actually qualifies is a live fight. So is whether the statute you plead to authorizes restitution at all. Jillian’s example of one Manhattan case with two counts, one carrying restitution and one not, is worth hearing before anyone signs a disposition, and it is part of why we keep coming back to forensic accountants and to early retention of financial experts.

The item nobody sees coming is what a company’s legal bills can become once one of its employees is convicted. Jillian walks through the pending case and the number, and it is the most expensive surprise of the night. She also lays out an argument for multi-defendant cases that judges rarely hear and would often grant.

About Caroline Ciraolo, Margaret Graham, and Jillian Berman

Caroline D. Ciraolo is a partner at Kostelanetz LLP, founder of its Washington, D.C. office, and the former Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Tax Division. Her portion covered collections, the IRS, and the tax treatment of assets caught in these orders, ground Karen Kelly has walked with us before. Margaret Graham is a partner at Latham & Watkins and spent almost eleven years as a prosecutor at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Jillian Berman does criminal defense at Lankler Siffert in New York and was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan before that. She organized this panel. All three were clear that they were nobody’s lawyer that night.