In 2013, Nina Marino, co-founder of the white-collar defense firm Kaplan Marino in Los Angeles, was representing a charter school operator charged with embezzlement and misuse of public funds. During her opening, she produced a large binder of minutes from the charter school’s meetings—an important detail to show that the school wasn’t, as she puts it, “some schlocky-run operation.” Then, as she spoke, she kept removing bundles of documents from the binder and slamming them on the ground.

“That’s enough theater in my courtroom, Ms. Marino,” the judge warned.

Theater, it should be mentioned, has long been part of Marino’s life. In high school, she starred as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Alice in Wonderland, and for a time she contemplated a professional acting career. Her mother had been a professional singer, too, before becoming a famous New York trial attorney.

But Marino draws a clear distinction between theater in the courtroom and being theatrical. She says lawyers who come out with “guns blazing” often do a disservice to their clients. “I’m exceedingly strategic in everything I do in the representation of clients,” she says.

She also shakes her head at lawyers who shuffle up to the podium in a courtroom. She strides up, head held high, and speaks in a strong, clear voice. “My mother told me something that I repeat when I teach and mentor lawyers,” Marino says. “I always establish a presence in the courtroom to control the courtroom. You have to decide the best place to stand. You have to do all these things to create a theatrical environment. I like all that.”

“I would call her passionate rather than theatrical,” says Saurish Appleby-Bhattacharjee, a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, who opposed Marino in a case when he was an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles. “She is sensitive to her audience. She talks to a jury in a natural and compelling way on a personal and emotional level. She is conversational and gets them to consider the humanity of the case.”

And it works. The charter school was acquitted of four of six charges during the six-week trial, and the other two charges were subsequently dismissed. Last May, Marino earned a victory at a 10-week trial in which her client was acquitted of bribing an official—even though, in the middle of the trial, that same client was arrested for witness tampering.

“She has a rare balance of being highly intelligent and having excellent litigation skills while also having amazing people skills and emotional intelligence,” says Tommy Otake, a partner with the Honolulu firm Alapa & Otake, who co-counseled on the case. He attributes the victory in large part to Marino taking thousands of pages of campaign spending records, call logs, and other complex material and turning them into charts the jury could quickly comprehend.

“Hawaii is not the easiest place for an outside lawyer to do a jury trial,” he says, “but the local jurors loved her. They appreciated she was down-to-earth and could connect with them.”

Perhaps even more than the acquittals, Marino’s success can be shown by the clients who received probationary sentences rather than jail time: a husband and wife who failed to file and pay taxes for more than six years despite living a lavish lifestyle; a doctor charged with 46 counts of misappropriation of public funds, embezzlement, and conflict of interest in his management of two hospitals.

“She lives, believes, and breathes her cases,” says Appleby-Bhattacharjee. “A lot of criminal defense attorneys are zealots who have deeply held beliefs about the government, which can affect their ability to advocate for their client. She’s a true believer without being a zealot.”

Though she flirted with acting, a career in the law seemed almost inevitable. Her uncles and cousins were lawyers. Both of her parents were lawyers. Her father, now 96, finally retired at age 90, while her mother still practices at 87. Her three siblings became lawyers as well. Dinner table conversations tended to be opinionated.

When Marino turned 13, her mother was recognized as one of the 10 best trial lawyers in the state by New York Law Journal. “My mother was very beautiful and dynamic, but also insanely smart. Seeing this young woman being honored alongside a bunch of men in their 60s was very impactful for me. Because of her, it never occurred to me that there was a glass ceiling that would only allow me to get so far.”

At the University of Miami, she majored in prelaw and became president of the prelaw society, then earned her J.D. at the University of La Verne College of Law in 1989. But she was impatient. “I did not embrace law school,” she says. “I knew I could be a good lawyer. I was ready.” 

She passed the Bar on the first try, was sworn in the next day, and was in court the day after that. A court-appointed attorney, she was assigned to cases when a public defender had a conflict, and ran between courthouses in Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Orange County. “It was a great way for me to learn a lot fast,” she says.

Her first case was appropriately cinematic. In the Hollywood Courthouse, before a judge named Wapner—the son of the famous People’s Court judge—she represented a male prostitute arrested on Hollywood Boulevard. She told the jury that the police had cast a wide net to catch a big fish, and her client was a little guppy. The jury acquitted him.

“When I started out, I just couldn’t believe the feeling of saving somebody from either being locked up, which is horrible, or just even the collateral consequences, such as licensing issues, employment issues, financial punishments,” she says.

Marino’s first white-collar case was decidedly less glitzy: It was held in a trailer. This was the early ‘90s, and the shabby West Los Angeles court building was overflowing, so trailers were set up on Purdue Avenue as makeshift courtrooms.

By then, Marino could predict how the non-white-collar criminal cases—battery, assault with a deadly weapon, a drug deal—would go. “There weren’t many permutations about how a case would play out,” she says. “There’s the person that makes them different, yeah, but the transactional part of the crime is not that different. Just by chance, I got a couple of business crimes, and I thought, ‘My God, this is so interesting.’”

Marino’s client was charged with 12 counts of embezzlement. At closing arguments, she stacked up all the evidence that showed his guilt, and a much larger pile of evidence that suggested his innocence. He was acquitted.

“I did this with tremendous drama,” she says. “The little pile of evidence against him was nothing. The visual was very powerful for the jury.” The gallery was filled with lawyers waiting for their trials. “They came up to congratulate me, because you don’t see defense verdicts all the time, and it was a sweep.”

One of those lawyers was Richard Kaplan, who had graduated from Pepperdine law school a couple of years before Marino earned her J.D. at La Verne. They became friends and eventually married. In 1998, they went into practice together.

Today, the Kaplan Marino firm is a true white-collar criminal defense boutique. It does not handle civil matters except crossover regulatory and administrative issues. Marino also hosts a podcast, White Collar Talks with Nina and Joe. Her co-host is Joe Whitley, the first general counsel to the Department of Homeland Security, and a top white-collar attorney in Atlanta. Guests have included Ray Banoun, one of the founders of the National Institute on White Collar Crime, trial attorneys Maggie O’Donnell and Bill Shepherd, and Prof. Lucian E. Dervan, the director of criminal justice studies at Belmont University College of Law.

She remains big on looking out for the next generation. “Mentoring women is a big part of who I am,” Marino says. She is a founding member of the LA chapter of the Women’s White Collar Defense Association, established the criminal justice section of the Women Lawyers Association of Los Angeles, and was appointed to the board of UC Santa Barbara’s Women in Leadership Program.

“I have been fortunate that so many have thought of me as someone they can come to for consultation,” she says.

Marino has made a career out of flipping the script with surprising strategy and tactics. “I’m always told, ‘I’m hiring you because you are not like all the other lawyers we’ve interviewed’,” she says. “I never was a prosecutor, I never was a public defender. And I think that gives me a unique skill set and helps me think differently than people that have been trained by big bureaucratic organizations.”

In 2016, Appleby-Bhattacharjee opposed Marino in a case that involved sheriff’s deputies who had beaten a suspect. Marino’s client, another deputy, was not involved in the beating but accused of covering it up.

“The odds were stacked against her,” says Appleby-Bhattacharjee. “But she put the government through the ringer in terms of gaps in the proofs about her client’s mental state.”

She also did something defense attorneys are hesitant to do: put a client on the stand. “The government had painted him as part of a corrupt fraternity that thought he was above the law,” Appleby-Bhattacharjee says. “But Nina prepared him, and he presented as very sympathetic and remorseful to the jury. What should have been a slam-dunk cross became very difficult.”

An important matter in the trial was how much was visible to her client, and Marino asked that the jury be bussed to the jail so they could see his perspective firsthand. When the judge refused the motion, Marino did the next best thing. She had a metal grate fashioned to represent the jail bars and brought it to court. “I’ve seen people bring charts and PowerPoints to a closing, but never a metal grate,” Appleby-Bhattacharjee says. “The jury was laser-focused. It was a perfect example of show, don’t tell.”

Give all this, is it any surprise that her favorite films are The Fast and the Furious movies? “I like fast cars, hot women, hot guys,” she says. “I love action. I love that they are the supposed bad guys but they turn out to always be the good guys.”

She adds: “It’s kind of like when people think defense lawyers are the bad guys and the government’s the good guys. I’ve never seen it like that. … These films sum up for me what it is to be a white collar lawyer: always the underdog, always underestimated, always working from the heart—and winning.”