Malcolm W. Beckett
Founder & Attorney
Criminal defense, business law, privacy, and cybersecurity law in Christiansburg, Virginia.
Malcolm Beckett practices criminal defense, civil rights, business law, privacy, and cybersecurity law at Valley Legal, PLLC in Christiansburg.
Few attorneys arrive at the practice of law by Malcolm’s route. Before law school, he spent almost a decade in law enforcement as a police officer and criminal investigator, working fraud and financial-crimes cases and coordinating multi-jurisdictional investigations with federal agencies. As more of the crimes he investigated came to involve technology, his work turned toward cybersecurity and technology itself — a shift that led to leadership roles in security and compliance in government, higher education, and the private sector before he became a lawyer.
That path shapes how Malcolm reads a case. He has investigated crimes, secured the systems criminals target, written the policies organizations use to manage risk, and now defends the people and businesses caught up in all of it. The domains align more closely than they appear: a criminal defense matter often turns on how an investigation was conducted; a business dispute often traces back to a data problem; a privacy question usually has a compliance answer. Having worked on each side of those lines, he reads a case file, policies, and statutes with equal fluency.
That experience shapes how he approaches criminal defense: he knows how cases are built, where investigations go wrong, and what the Commonwealth has to prove. He is certified by the Virginia Indigent Defense Commission to accept court-appointed felony and misdemeanor cases. He is also a qualified guardian ad litem for children and qualified court-appointed counsel for parents and guardians, on the lists the Office of the Executive Secretary of the Supreme Court of Virginia maintains for those appointments.
Malcolm has served as in-house counsel for a Fortune 500 insurance company, where he led the cybersecurity, ethics, and financial-crimes programs and advised the enterprise on privacy, incident response, fraud, and financial crimes. He holds the CISSP, CIPP/US, CIPP/E, and CIPM credentials and is a Fellow of Information Privacy.
He has taught as an adjunct professor of law at Mitchell Hamline School of Law (Contracts, Evidence, Secured Transactions, and Business Organizations) and has served on the faculty of Southern New Hampshire University since 2014. He has contributed more than 2,000 hours of pro bono service through the Minnesota Justice Foundation, co-authored a legal literacy guide for incarcerated people, and designed and built several technological tools to increase access to justice.
Education
- Juris Doctor, summa cum laude — Mitchell Hamline School of Law
- Doctor of Business Administration — National Graduate School
- M.S., Information and Telecommunications Systems Management — Capitol Technology University
- B.S., Criminal Justice — Bluefield College
Bar Admissions
- Supreme Court of Virginia
- Minnesota Supreme Court
- U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
- U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
- U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia
Contact
- Email: [email protected]
Valley Legal, PLLC is a law firm registered in the Commonwealth of Virginia.