McGuireWoods on Monday announced that it recruited a top federal white-collar prosecutor in Manhattan, Jason Cowley, who led the insider-trading case against former U.S. Representative Chris Collins.

Cowley co-led the Southern District of New York's securities fraud task force and formerly headed up its anti-money laundering and asset forfeiture unit.

McGuireWoods was the logical destination, said Cowley, citing the firm's white-collar work for clients like Boeing, Wells Fargo, and Vice President Mike Pence as well as its presence in Charlotte, North Carolina, his hometown.

Cowley will work out of the Charlotte office as a partner in its government investigations & white collar litigation department.

"After 13 years in government, I was just excited for a new challenge, and felt it would be a good time to pivot into something new," Cowley said.

Cowley was the SDNY's securities and commodities fraud task force co-chief for three-and-a-half years. It was in that role that Cowley prosecuted Collins, a New York Republican who was sentenced in January to 26 months in prison after pleading guilty to taking part in an insider-trading scheme.

Cowley was also the lead trial prosecutor in the case against Brian Block, who was convicted in 2017 of fraudulently inflating the financial statements of American Realty Capital Properties, where he was the chief financial officer.

"That high-level work, coupled with the highest-caliber defense counsel on the other side in many of our cases, has given the type of experience that I hope will serve me well as an attorney in private practice," Cowley said.

Now at McGuireWoods, Cowley will be on the opposite side of the table of those kinds of investigations. In some ways, the work will be very different, but in some ways it'll be the same, Cowley said, noting that he could be hired by a company to investigate alleged misconduct or wrongdoing.

"That factual inquiry is what being a prosecutor is all about," Cowley said.

The U.S. Army last week announced that Jonathan Harmon, the chairman of McGuireWoods, would serve on an independent panel that would investigate the culture at Fort Hood after a 20-year-old soldier who went missing earlier this year and was found dead more than two months later. Vanessa Guillen's family has claimed that she was the victim of sexual harassment at the base.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct the name of Jason Cowley.