Kristina Maritczak is a Partner in the Firm’s Seattle office and a member of the Labor and Employment, White Collar & Investigations & State Attorneys General practice groups. Kristina works with businesses and financial institutions to assist them in navigating risk by providing advice and counsel on employment issues, conducting employment and fraud investigations, implementing compliance programs and defending enforcement actions. She also assists companies with M&A due diligence.
Kristina is dedicated to providing her clients with practical employment advice and helps them to be proactive in minimizing legal risk, while also vigorously defending them when they are in crisis and managing reputational risk. She helps clients work through difficult employee relations issues and adeptly investigates workplace complaints. Kristina also advises on strategic responses to investigative findings. Clients rely on Kristina to draft policies and procedures that are not only legally compliant but also able to be implemented into everyday business processes in an effective, understandable, and common-sense manner.
Kristina draws on her many years of experience in the financial services industry, where she created and led a financial fraud investigations team that successfully pursued litigation and other remedial measures, to successfully develop and oversee recovery efforts for financial institutions. She assists clients in implementing proactive strategies to prevent fraudulent activity and helps implement onerous regulations into business operations, while also creating a framework to make her clients financially successful.
Businesses and high-net worth individuals alike depend on Kristina to skillfully prevent, mitigate, defuse, and resolve high-stakes, high-visibility, time-sensitive crisis situations that threaten reputational risk. She also has a passion for working closely with clients to prevent and mitigate legal and reputational risk to avoid crisis situations. Her practice often involves coordinating national and international teams of experts in disciplines such as surveillance & investigations, forensics, crisis communications/media management and political consulting.
Additionally, as a result of her experience as a Chief Risk Officer, Kristina has helped her clients put into place risk management systems to identify major risk areas within their companies by assessing and prioritizing areas of risk and, developing & implementing policies and procedures but also positively impacting the company’s financial bottom line. As a former General Counsel, Kristina is uniquely positioned to understand a company’s operations and develop compliant strategies in the areas of employment, financial fraud prevention, cybersecurity and other regulatory matters with an eye toward preserving the financial success of her clients businesses and protecting their competitive edge in the marketplace.
Kristina is dedicated to making a positive difference in the community. She has served on a number of non-profit Boards of Directors and is currently working with local business leaders to create a teen financial literacy and entrepreneurship program that can be used as a national model.