Amy Kurland

After serving as a federal prosecutor for 24 years, Amy Kurland was hand-picked by then Mayor-elect Michael Nutter to become Philadelphia’s Inspector General. She held this post for 12 years, longer than any other Inspector General in the city’s history, before becoming a consultant for Bloomberg Associates, where she assisted cities such as Paris, Lima, Atlanta and Detroit in their efforts to prevent public corruption and better serve their residents through improved effectiveness, transparency, integrity, and efficiency of their programs.

As Rohn Kurland’s co-founder and co-chair Amy’s strategy is prevention. She Identifies risks to clients and guides them safely through government inquiries, investigations, enforcement actions and indictments. Her practice focuses on complex criminal, commercial, and financial litigation at both the trial and appellate levels. She also handles internal investigations and corporate counseling, especially regarding corporate governance, ethics initiatives, and reputational risk management.

Amy has extensive experience handling complex investigations and litigation.  For 24 years, Amy served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney, Senior Litigation Counsel and Professional Responsibility Officer, leading large-scale investigations and prosecutions involving sophisticated fraud schemes and public corruption. She tried over 50 federal jury trials and argued numerous appeals.  In recognition of her trial skills, Amy was selected to develop and implement a trial practice program for newly appointed judges and prosecutors in the emerging democratic government of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2000-2005. From 2008 to 2019, as Inspector General for the City of Philadelphia, Amy directed hundreds of investigations, including extensive joint criminal investigations with federal law enforcement. 

Amy has broad experience counseling large institutions on governance best practices, ethics initiatives, and reputational risk management.  As Philadelphia’s Inspector General, Amy is widely credited with transforming the Inspector General's office into a strong, independent anti-corruption agency.  During her time leading the office, it conducted investigations, reviews and analyses involving all operations of the City of Philadelphia, a $4.5 billion-per-year municipal corporation.  Her work included advising City leaders and agency heads about preventing fraud, corruption and waste, and issuing investigative reports that examined large segments of City government.  During this time, Amy served on the faculty of the Association of Inspectors General, an international organization charged with certification of Inspectors General and investigators and with recommending anti-corruption efforts and ethics reforms. In recognition of these achievements Amy was called upon to counsel the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on best practices to prevent fraud and corruption in a program in Kinshasa sponsored by the U.S African Command of the U.S. Department of Defense.

In these positions, Amy regularly explained complex ethical issues to the public, and recommended effective governance and ethics reforms to large, complex institutions.  She has broad experience in proactively identifying and mitigating risks before they materialize into crisis scenarios. Amy has been a frequent speaker on ethics issues and criminal matters.

Amy also has had considerable experience in several of her positions with matters involving intense public scrutiny. She testified several times before Philadelphia City Council and City Councils in Atlanta and Dallas in support of controversial bills and wrote editorials in the Philadelphia papers in support of and in defense of those bills.

As a manager and consultant with Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic non-profit, she worked with city clients worldwide to improve urban environments, develop best practices, build capacity, and foster key relationships in the areas of integrity and ethics, anti-corruption, transparency, efficiency, internal operations, procurement, and COVID-related issues.

Amy has served on the boards of the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA), where she was a member of the Audit Committee, Women Against Abuse, Jewish Family and Children’s Services, University Barge Club and the Head of the Schuylkill Regatta.  She is an avid masters rower.