Meghan Blanco began her legal career representing Fortune 500 companies, in complex civil litigation and white-collar defense, as an associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. In 2009, she was appointed Assistant United States Attorney for the Central District of California. During her tenure as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Public Corruption and Civil Rights Section, Meghan served as lead prosecutor on close to 100 criminal matters. In that role, she investigated and prosecuted cases charging bribery, extortion, drug trafficking, obstruction of justice, and murder under color of law. After leaving the U.S. Attorney’s Office in 2015, Meghan has taken many of the justice system’s most complex criminal cases to trial. She has tried cases charging VICAR RICO, rape under color of law, international drug trafficking, international drug trafficking resulting in death, international hostage taking resulting in death, and use of weapons of mass destruction resulting in death, and she has beaten the government in more than half of the cases that she has tried. Meghan has successfully litigated discovery violations in state and federal courts. As a result, she has secured several dismissals for clients charged in federal narcotics cases, including once for her client’s codefendants who were already serving lengthy federal sentences. In October, Meghan forced the United States to dismiss a VICAR RICO and drug trafficking case against her client, who was a defense lawyer indicted by the United States in 2018 for allegedly facilitating the Mexican Mafia’s criminal enterprise. Meghan hung the trial in 2022, with the jury voting 9-3 in favor of acquittal. On the verge of retrial last year, after synthesizing thousands of pages of confidential CDCR records, Meghan established that the United States violated Brady by withholding exculpatory evidence before the first trial. As a result, the United States was forced to drop the RICO and drug charges, and Meghan’s client, who was facing life in prison, pleaded to a single count of misprision of a felony and received probation. Meghan has received numerous awards and accolades. She has been named a Rising Star or a Super Lawyer every year since returning to private practice, was nominated as the defense attorney of the year by the Riverside County Bar Association, and recently received the Johnnie Cochran Memorial Award for the Relentless Pursuit of Justice by the Los Angeles County Criminal Courts Bar Association.