Barbara A. Martinez

Barbara A. Martinez is an experienced trial attorney in Holland & Knight's Miami office and a member of the firm's White Collar Defense and Investigations Team as well as the Global Compliance and Investigations Team. Ms. Martinez focuses her practice on white collar defense, internal corporate investigations, anti-human trafficking, supply chain management and corporate compliance. She is co-leader of Holland & Knight’s Women in White Collar working group.

Prior to joining Holland & Knight, Ms. Martinez was a distinguished federal prosecutor. She served more than 22 years at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), both at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida and at the Criminal Fraud Section in Washington, D.C. She has prosecuted economic crime cases, including healthcare fraud, bank fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. She also prosecuted cases and led multidisciplinary teams in matters involving human trafficking, immigration violations, extortion, cybercrimes, crimes against children and other transnational crimes.

Ms. Martinez tried numerous complex federal jury trials as lead counsel in the Southern District of Florida and many bench trials in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. She was chief of the Special Prosecutions Section and served in various other leadership roles at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami, including as the human trafficking coordinator for the Southern District of Florida. She regularly led multidisciplinary teams handling complex investigations in the U.S. and overseas.

White Collar Defense and Investigations

Chambers USA 2024 recognized Ms. Martinez for her defense work in white collar crime and government investigations. She represents companies, financial institutions and individuals targeted for criminal prosecution and enforcement actions by federal, state and local governmental entities.

Ms. Martinez draws on her experience as a defense attorney and former DOJ prosecutor to advise and effectively advocate for her clients through criminal enforcement actions, regulatory matters and government investigations involving:

• bank fraud
• embezzlement/theft
• Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA)
• healthcare fraud
• immigration violations
• extortion
• human trafficking
• stalking
• money laundering

Internal Investigations

Ms. Martinez regularly represents corporations, financial institutions and their boards to handle internal investigations involving allegations of fraud (including bank fraud, healthcare fraud and false claims), theft, embezzlement, money laundering, FCPA, immigration violations, child pornography, sexual harassment and human trafficking. She advises these clients about reporting requirements and routinely guides clients in reporting criminal conduct to law enforcement. 

She also helps clients assess risk and build/revise compliance programs as needed.

Receiverships

A federal court appointed Ms. Martinez to serve in a fiduciary role as a receiver tasked with recovering assets and analyzing any potential claims on behalf of the receivership for the benefit of those defrauded in a large international fraud scheme.

Anti-Human Trafficking: Supply Chain and Risk Management, Compliance and Training

Ms. Martinez has years of experience in identifying, investigating and prosecuting labor and sex trafficking cases. She led a team of prosecutors and investigators in enforcing anti-human trafficking laws for more than a decade. She also led transnational investigation teams and tried complex international human trafficking cases.

Ms. Martinez advises clients on corporate compliance and best practices relating to social governance, human trafficking, transparency in supply chains, supply chain controls, reporting human trafficking, extraterritorial provisions of U.S. federal anti-trafficking laws and federal contract employee risk management under Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) anti-trafficking provisions. She also advises on civil anti-trafficking litigation risks.

Ms. Martinez has extensive experience teaching and conducting anti-human training courses for companies, educators, financial institutions, law enforcement, legal and medical professionals in the U.S. and abroad.

Most recently, in 2024, Ms. Martinez was an instructor for the American Bar Association’s Rule of Law Initiative and taught judges from Colombia about handling human trafficking criminal cases.

In December 2022, Ms. Martinez served as an instructor at the Federal Judicial Center for U.S. federal courts (FJC) in Washington, D.C., to provide advanced train-the-trainers courses on human trafficking for judges from India.

In November 2021, she taught judges from India about human trafficking issues at the Central and East European Law Initiative (CEELI) Institute in Prague as part of a program sponsored in partnership by the FJC, the National Judicial Academy of India and CEELI. She also taught a Human Trafficking Seminar as an adjunct professor at the University of Miami School of Law from 2011-2024.

Reporting Child Pornography and Other Cyber Crimes

Ms. Martinez is highly knowledgeable on victim rights laws and certain cybercrimes, including child pornography and cyberstalking, as well as online human trafficking activity, threats and sextortion. In addition to serving as the human trafficking coordinator and the project safe childhood coordinator for the Southern District of Florida for more than a decade as a former DOJ prosecutor, Ms. Martinez also served as a member of DOJ's Child Exploitation Nationwide Investigation Advisory Committee for about six years until she joined Holland & Knight.

In her current practice, Ms. Martinez advises companies, educational institutions and organizations about risk management relating to safety and threat management policies, online electronic data collection and storage, privacy and victim issues related to business practices, including reporting child pornography and other crimes.