Won S. Shin is Of Counsel in the Litigation Department of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.

Before rejoining the firm, Mr. Shin served for nearly a decade in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, including four years as Chief of Appeals for the Criminal Division. In that role, Mr. Shin supervised the office’s criminal practice in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, litigating important issues in a wide range of prosecutions, including in the areas of securities fraud, public corruption, and asset forfeiture. He also counseled senior leadership on complex legal and policy matters and advised other prosecutors on legal issues arising in their cases.

Mr. Shin was previously a member of the Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, where he investigated and prosecuted cases involving bank fraud and bribery, tax evasion, healthcare fraud, theft of trade secrets, consumer fraud, network intrusions, cryptocurrency, and foreign official bribery. For his work in the unit, Mr. Shin received the FinCEN Director’s Law Enforcement Award for Cyber Threats.

Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mr. Shin was an Assistant Solicitor General in the New York Attorney General’s Office, where he briefed and argued cases in the Second Circuit and New York state appellate courts. He handled a wide range of civil and regulatory cases, including constitutional challenges to state law, fraud and antitrust enforcement actions, challenges to agency determinations, and civil rights, employment, and tort suits.

Before entering public service, Mr. Shin was a litigation associate at Wachtell Lipton and in the appellate practice of a firm in Washington, DC. Mr. Shin began his legal career as a law clerk to the Honorable Karen Nelson Moore of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

Mr. Shin received his A.B., magna cum laude, in biochemical sciences from Harvard College, and his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. Prior to law school, he was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company.

Mr. Shin has taught legal writing at Harvard Law School and Columbia Law School. He has served on the board of directors of the Asian American Bar Association of New York since 2020. He received the Society of Asian Federal Officers’ Prosecutor of the Year Award in 2023.