Michael Pace is a senior managing director in the FTI Forensic and Litigation Consulting segment and is based in Chicago. Mr. Pace specializes in conducting complex investigative assignments for boards and senior management at public and private corporations, legal counsel, and the financial sector. Mr. Pace's case work has included corporate investigations involving allegations of fraud or corporate corruption, due diligence investigations, and dispute-related inquiries. He has conducted investigations in the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.
Experience
Among his numerous internal corporate investigations, Mr. Pace recently led a global inquiry for a multi-national investment firm involving the misappropriation of trade secrets, proprietary trading strategies, and other valuable intellectual property assets, and he investigated kickbacks and self-dealing in connection with construction projects at a client’s Mexico City operations. Mr. Pace has led audit committee investigations, including a case for a $12 billion publicly-traded manufacturing company that involved allegations of significant accounting fraud and other misconduct. Mr. Pace also has significant FCPA experience, most recently leading the risk assessment of a global health care company’s operations and practices in China; conducting an investigation of alleged FCPA violations in Europe and Argentina for a medical device manufacturer; and leading the FCPA pre-acquisition due diligence in Pakistan, Oman, Bangladesh, Egypt, China, and Indonesia related to the commercial agents of a target company in the oil and gas sector.
Before joining FTI, Mr. Pace was managing director and co-leader of the Dispute Analysis and Forensics practice at Alvarez & Marsal in Chicago. He previously was the Chicago office head for Kroll Associates, Inc. where, for eight years, he built and led Kroll's investigations, intelligence and security businesses in the Midwestern United States. Before opening Kroll’s office in Chicago, Mr. Pace was a litigator at Jenner & Block, handling commercial and civil litigation matters, white collar criminal defense cases, and internal investigations. He began his career in 1989 as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Chicago with the Department of Justice, where he spent five years investigating and prosecuting fraud, racketeering, narcotics, violent crime and other complex cases.
Mr. Pace has applied a variety of forensic accounting, investigative, computer forensics, and analytical resources to solve client problems. In a trade secret matter, his team proved that key management at a client subsidiary company had been planning to form a competitor and were illegally influencing buyers in the industry. As a result of his team's investigation, the client saved $30 million in the form of various payouts. In another matter, he investigated and quantified allegations that a client's $1 billion per year customer was improperly manipulating its reporting on a complex contractual pricing mechanism. Mr. Pace regularly help clients respond to subpoenas and inquiries from regulators and third parties that require collecting, processing, hosting, and reviewing substantial volumes of electronic data, including email, MS Office documents, transactional data from financial systems, and other electronically stored information.
Mr. Pace has a J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law and a B.S. in Finance from the College of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of Illinois. He is a member of the Chicago Crime Commission, the American Bar Association and the Federal Bar Association.