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Six years ago, Clint Vince tried to lure lawyer and lobbyist Elliot Portnoy to his firm, Sullivan & Worcester. No dice. Portnoy went to Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, where he rapidly rose to become the firm's chairman. And he just made a successful counteroffer to Vince, who headed Sullivan & Worcester's Washington office.

Vince, James Costan, and 16 other members of Sullivan's energy practice have bolted for Sonnenschein's Public Law and Policy Strategies group, which includes everything from M&A to lobbying and corporate responsibility work.

The Sullivan & Worcester group is bringing all their energy group clients with them, a practice that is skewed toward electricity and natural gas clients. Vince will be the head of the firm's Energy and Regulated Industries practice, a subsection of the Public Law and Policy Strategies group.

The deal went fast. Only three weeks elapsed, Vince says, between the first "out of the blue" to the phone call from Portnoy and the formal deal this week.

"I'm not very good at creeping around," he says. "I didn't want to be disrespectful of my prior firm."

Bolstering Vince's confidence in the deal, he says, was his relationship with Portnoy (they used to be co-counsels representing the City of New Orleans' electricity needs) and the advantages of Sonnenschein's national platform. The overlap between Sonnenschein's environmental practice and his group's energy work was attractive, Vince says, given the increasing prospects of government-imposed carbon restraints.

Sonnenschein's lobbying practice was another incentive.

"All of our energy-related clients either need to know what's going on on Capitol Hill or they need to shape policy," Vince says. Vince says he and former Sullivan attorneys Doug MacKinnon and Bess Conway "do some legislative work, but we didn't have anything on this order of magnitude. We were kind of grasshoppers on this."

For Sonnnenschein, PLPS head Mike McNamara says, the Sullivan & Worcester group will provide a way to serve existing corporate and environmental law and lobbying clients with energy stakes. Vince will join Sonnenschein's national energy practice leadership group, expanding the number of Sonnenschein attorneys working in energy matters nationwide by 50 percent.

"This may be the largest energy practice to move in Washington since Clint took the energy practice to his former firm," McNamara says. "Getting them integrated is our priority right now."

The attorneys are bringing their entire book of energy clients with them. McNamara describes the group's numbers as "very substantial" but declined to name a value. Additional arrivals to the practice are likely on the way this month, McNamara says.

There's one problem: Sonnenschein, which brought Claude Fontheim and the 11 other members of trade-focused consulting firm Fontheim International in-house with a strategic alliance in December, is a little short on space. For the time being, Vince is working out of a converted conference room, and members of his firm are scattered throughout other sections of Sonnenschein's office.

First reported in The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times