He served as a homicide prosecutor and ADA in the Major Offense/Career Criminal Bureau of New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, where he became an accomplished trial lawyer and was called “one of the nation’s foremost DNA experts” by Newsday. He was a litigation associate at Cahill Gordon and law clerk to Judge Leonard Moore of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. 

Harlan’s work in private practice includes representing: a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical chain as national settlement counsel in opioids litigation brought by states, counties and cities across the United States; lead trial counsel for the Commonwealth of Kentucky in a price gouging case against two Fortune 500 corporations (resolved on the eve of trial by mediation including Harlan and then Attorney General Beshear); the chief fundraiser for Mayor Bill de Blasio in a lengthy and high-profile criminal investigation of the Mayor and fundraiser in which federal prosecutors from the Southern District of NY decided not to indict following advocacy for the defense by the fundraiser’s lawyer (Harlan) and the Mayor’s lawyer; Banque Indosuez at trial against claims by Venezuelan investors that their losses in international currency trading were the result of fraud, demonstrating through his direct and cross-examination of experts that the investors had “made the wrong bet;” and led the briefing on behalf of survivors of World War II slave labor camps in a class action against German industrial corporations in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York -- resolved in the Eastern District and other jurisdictions by a 2000 Treaty between the governments of the United States and Germany requiring payment totaling 10 Billion Deutsche Marks from the German government and German industrial corporations for compensation to survivors. 

Harlan is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Citizens Budget Commission and Co-Chair of the Committee on Civic Education of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (“the Association”). He served as Chair of the Board of Directors of the Association; Chair of the Association’s Council on Criminal Justice; Chair of the Association’s Immigration Amnesty Counseling Committee; and President of the Federal Bar Council Inn of Court. He received Citizen Union’s “Public Service Award” and the “John J. McCloy Award” from the Fund for Modern Courts. 

He has spoken at venues including: the Second Circuit Judicial Conference; the Judicial Conference of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York; Columbia Law School’s General Counsel Forum; NYU Law School’s Center on the Administration of Criminal Justice; two Federal Bar Council Bench and Bar Conferences; the New York City Bar Association Litigation Summit; hearings by the National Institute of Justice; the Governor’s Law Enforcement Forum: the American Bar Association; the New York County Lawyers Association; and as Keynote speaker at a conference on the Ethical Legal and Social Implications of the Human Genome Project sponsored the National Institutes of Health and Tuck School of Business. His numerous appearances on national television as a court and trial commentator include CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox and Court TV. 

He is the author of And the Blood Cried Out, which the New York Times described as a “highly regarded book about DNA in the courtroom,” published by HarperCollins in the U.S. in hardcover and paperback, and by Hara Shoba in Japan. It was reviewed by critics as “superb” (Wall Street Journal), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), and “featuring smooth and easy writing but also containing the thriller’s cliffhanging suspense” (The Boston Globe). His non-fiction popular book was excerpted in Waltz & Park, Cases and Materials on Evidence (Foundation Press). He has published articles in The New York Times, the Daily News, the ABA’s Litigation magazine, the Huffington Post, and The New York Law Journal.

He is a graduate of: Columbia Law School, where he was Executive Editor of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review and a Charles Evans Hughes Fellow; and Amherst College, where he was Class Day Speaker at Commencement and received the Psi Upsilon or “First Citizen of the College Prize,” awarded by the President and Deans “to that member of the graduating class who is considered preeminent in scholarship, leadership, athletics and character.”