It’s official: New Susman Godfrey associate Stephen Shackelford Jr. is one smart cookie.

After graduating magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he twice won the school’s prestigious Sears Prize for highest class GPA, Shackelford passed the Virginia bar exam in 2006 and spent the next two years clerking for 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Michael Boudin and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.