State Appellate Vets Team Up; Another Law Firm Merger; Inside Clyde's Insurance Practice Play

Washington Wrap is a weekly roundup of Big Law hires and other Washington, D.C., legal industry news. Read the previous edition here. Send tips and lateral moves to Katelyn Polantz at [email protected].

Elbert Lin and Stuart Raphael, two new partners at Richmond, Virginia-based Hunton & Williams, may be one of the oddest legal couples in the district. Lin is a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas who joined Hunton & Williams from Wiley Rein, while Raphael had been a partner at Hunton & Williams years ago, before he went to work for Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

Both have served as state solicitors general—Lin in West Virginia and Raphael in Virginia. Despite their shared state border, the two found themselves on opposite sides of major cases, with Raphael arguing for the rights of same-sex couples and Lin opposed the Obama administration on the Clean Power Plan and other policies.

On the marriage case in Virginia, which Raphael argued in the Fourth Circuit barely a month after becoming state SG, he took notice of Lin’s work. “I thought his brief expressed as well as anyone could the other side,” Raphael said. “He wasn’t right, but I grew to respect his legal opinion.”

The pair is hoping to carve out a book of business among the appellate attorneys at Hunton & Williams. Raphael will work out of Northern Virginia, while Lin will move to Richmond.

They feel especially ready to argue in the Fourth Circuit, and hope to be appellate generalists, not just advocates on issues of federalism and state-level briefs. Still, the decision to join together at a firm plays off of the rise of state AG-driven litigation and the vocal role states now frequently take in cases of national importance.

“I think the state solicitor’s experience is second to none,” Lin said. He described his time in West Virginia, where he was the first SG officeholder in recent memory, as “the dream appellate job, to be not just an advocate, but run an appellate shop.”

The Churn—Beltway edition:

• Covington & Burling brought Jennifer Saulino over from Wilkinson Walsh + Eskovitz in Washington. Saulino had been there a little more than a year as a partner, after working in the fraud section at the Justice Department under Andrew Weissmann. “Covington offered me a really exciting opportunity to marry my focus on trial work with Covington’s diverse practice areas and client base on a very large scale,” Saulino said. While she worked on cases for pharmaceuticals clients at Wilkinson Walsh, Saulino plans to build a more general practice in commercial litigation trial work at Covington.
• Kirkland & Ellis hired Paul Brinkman as an intellectual property partner in Washington. Brinkman focuses on litigation before the International Trade Commission. He previously worked at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, where he was a founding partner of its D.C. office.
• Christina Guerola Sarchio joined Dechert as a litigation partner in D.C. She previously was Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe’s class action “strike team” chairwoman and was on the firm’s board of directors. My colleague Brian Baxter noted that Sarchio is known for her work for the National Basketball Players Association. And the reason she landed at Dechert? Give it up for former D.C. acting U.S. Attorney Vincent Cohen Jr.
• Jeff Beatrice will join Steptoe & Johnson LLP as a partner focused on export controls, economic sanctions, anti-money laundering and firearms industry regulatory matters. He moves from Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, which he joined in 2015. Before that, he was the anti-money laundering general counsel at Citigroup Inc. and an assistant U.S. attorney in D.C.
• John McInerney, formerly of the Commerce Department, joined Mayer Brown as an international trade counsel in D.C.
• Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr added Petal Walker as a D.C.-based special counsel, since she has left the position of chief counsel for Commissioner Sharon Bowen at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Walker had been at Wilmer previously until 2014.
• Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck added William “Bill” McGrath as a shareholder in Washington in its energy, environment and resource strategies group. Most recently he was staff director for a U.S. House subcommittee on the interior.
• The firm also rearranged the energy, environment and resource strategies group leadership. Jon Hrobsky and Luke Johnson, both policy directors, become co-chairmen for the group.
• Colette Honorable, the former Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner, will be a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center in addition to practicing law at Reed Smith.
• The American Bar Association doled out a rare “not qualified” rating to Trump judicial nominee Charles Goodwin, according to Buzzfeed News. Goodwin is a federal magistrate judge in Oklahoma City and is nominated as a federal district judge in the Western District of Oklahoma.
• Will Hunton & Williams merge with Texas’ Andrews Kurth? Both firms were tight-lipped this week after rumors of preliminary merger talks popped up.
• Another Dentons combination to note this week. The world’s largest law firm is picking up Gallo Barrios Pickmann in Peru.

Inside Clyde: