Matteson Ellis

Matteson Ellis founded and leads Miller & Chevalier's globally recognized Latin America practice, ranked as the sole Chambers Latin America Band 1 International Counsel firm for Corporate Crime & Investigations. He guides clients on cross-border internal investigations and corporate compliance strategies to address bribery and corruption/U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practice Act (FCPA) allegations, transnational criminal organization (TCO) and Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) exposure, related economic sanctions and anti-money laundering (AML) risks, and similarly sensitive ethics and compliance matters. Legal and compliance departments, boards of directors, audit committees, and private equity firms regularly look to Matt to lead independent investigations, perform compliance due diligence in mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and build corporate compliance strategies to align with the expectations of the U.S Department of Justice (DOJ), the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and other global regulators.

Matt is preeminent in the burgeoning legal field of organized crime, anti-terrorism, and corporate compliance in Latin America. He regularly publishes on the topic and co-chaired the inaugural American Conference Institute Forum on Cartels, TCOs, and Compliance in Latin America. He is an adjunct faculty member at the University of Texas School of Law where he teaches the country's only law school course on Cartels, Corporations, and Anti-Terrorism Law.

Matt also specializes in multilateral development bank (MDB) and World Bank investigations and sanctions proceedings. He previously worked as a Litigation Specialist and Investigator at the World Bank Integrity Vice Presidency (INT) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Office of Institutional Integrity (OII). He currently advises companies on responding to audit letters, show cause notices, and notices of sanctions proceedings, defending matters before evaluation officers and sanctions boards, negotiating settlement agreements, and managing debarment period requirements. He is one of only a handful of private sector U.S. attorneys with firsthand insight from "both sides of the table" for navigating World Bank and IDB investigations. 

As a multilingual attorney, Matt has performed on-site investigations in more than 40 countries throughout the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Africa. He is a recognized leader in Latin America, having been selected as a Chambers Global and Chambers Latin America Band 1 attorney for corporate crime and investigations in the region for more than a decade. One client tells Chambers Latin America, "He literally wrote the book on Latin American corporate crime," and another states, "He is one of the best compliance lawyers I have ever worked with, not just for his knowledge of the field, but also his accuracy and decisiveness in implementing compliance matters in complicated markets." Matt is regularly named one of Latin America's top 100 lawyers by Latinvex, which recognizes him as "the leading expert on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Latin America." 

He is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese and spent several years in Latin America working for a Fortune 50 multinational corporation and a government ethics watchdog group. Matt has published various books and articles and has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post on his areas of expertise.