The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

SEC Names Ex-Wilmer Partner as New General Counsel

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced that White House attorney Anne Small has been named the agency's next general counsel, the first woman to serve in that role.

Since October 2011, Small has served as both special assistant and associate counsel to President Barack Obama. She also previously worked as the deputy general counsel for litigation and adjudication at the SEC. Geoffrey Aronow, who became SEC general counsel in January, will now serve as senior counsel to Chairman Mary Jo White.

In private practice, Small was a litigation partner in Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr's New York office. She is the latest in a long string of Wilmer alums to land a high-profile job at the SEC. Mark Cahn, who was general counsel from 2011 until the end of 2012, had been a partner at Wilmer.

Daily D.C. Lateral Roundup: Kilpatrick Townsend

Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton has added a former Federal Trade Commission attorney to its antitrust practice in Washington.

Melanie Sabo, who spent six years as assistant director of the FTC's anticompetitive practices division, joins Kilpatrick as a partner. At the agency, Sabo oversaw a staff of 32 attorneys charged with overseeing the investigation and enforcement of anticompetitive behavior.

From 1993 to 1998, Sabo was a trial attorney in the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division, where she worked on matters related to price-fixing, mergers and criminal trials. Sabo was also formerly a partner K&L Gates and counsel at King & Spalding.

Q&A: McDermott's Bobby Burchfield & Paul Thompson

It's been almost two years since Paul Thompson and Bobby Burchfield have shared the title of co-managing partner of McDermott Will & Emery's Washington office. In that time the firm has added partners to its ranks and made a high-profile move to Capitol Hill.

Thompson, who focuses his practice on white-collar criminal defense, congressional investigations and appellate work, recently celebrated his six-year anniversary with the firm. Burchfield, who has served as co-managing partner since he joined the firm in 2004, practices in corporate litigation. He is also a member of the firm's management committee.

Legal Times sat down with Burchfield and Thompson in the firm's office to discuss the firm's business, goals for the D.C. office and Washington politics.

Judge Rejects Stay in SEC Subpoena Fight with Deloitte

A federal trial judge in Washington today refused to put the brakes on the effort by U.S. securities regulators to squeeze audit documents from a Deloitte unit in China.

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler adopted the recommendation of a magistrate judge who'd determined the subpoena enforcement proceeding, which tests the scope of the power of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to grab documents abroad, should no longer be subject to a stay order.

"It has been more than twenty-two months since the SEC first sought these documents from Deloitte," Kessler said in her ruling. "Obviously, a thorough, comprehensive investigation only gets more difficult with the passage of time."

Lawyers for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CPA Ltd., represented by teams from Sidley Austin and Latham & Watkins, fought to keep the case on ice as the securities agency’s lawyers negotiated with counterparts in China to try to obtain the documents.

Supreme Court Declines Review of Judicial Pay Case

By Marcia Coyle

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the government's appeal of a decision finding that Congress violated the compensation clause when it withheld cost of living salary adjustments for federal judges in the 1990s and in 2007 and 2010.

The denial of review in U.S. v. Beer ended litigation that had roots more than three decades ago.

The en banc U.S.. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled last fall that a 1989 law prevented Congress from abrogating the law 's "precise and definite commitment" to automatic yearly cost of living adjustments for sitting members of the judiciary. The appellate court ruling is here.

Check back in later for an update on today's Supreme Court action.

DOJ, Anheuser Settle Antitrust Suit Over Beer

In a settlement that includes one of the largest divestures of all time, beer giant Anheuser-Busch InBev reached a deal with the Department of Justice today to proceed with its acquisition of Grupo Modelo.

But winning antitrust approval came at a steep price. The company must divest Modelo's entire U.S. business, including beer brands such as Corona, as well as its most advanced brewery.

The assets will be sold to Constellation Brands, Inc. for an estimated $4.75 billion, and will make Constellation the third-biggest beer company in the United States.

Weil Names New D.C. Managing Partner

Weil, Gotshal & Manges has a new leader of its Washington office. Steven Tyrrell is taking over as managing partner after the firm’s former D.C. managing partner, Michael Lyle, and litigation partner Eric Lyttle announced their departure for Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan.

Lyle and Lyttle are the latest partners to defect from Weil to join Quinn. In January 2012, partner William Burck left Weil for Quinn to serve as co-head of the Washington office, alongside Jon Corey. News of the lateral move was first reported by Above the Law on Wednesday. The Am Law Daily also covered the move.

Before joining Weil in February 2010, Tyrrell was chief of the Fraud Section at the U.S. Department of Justice, where he oversaw about 60 attorneys. In an interview, Tyrrell said the firm will accelerate its plan for growth in the D.C. office.

“It is likely we will be adding people in the regulatory area,” Tyrrell said. “This is an important growth area for the firm and when the right opportunities come up, we will make moves.”

Deceased Judge's Family Sues Law Firm for Infringement

The family of the late Donald Duvall, former chief administrative law judge for the International Trade Commission, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against a Washington law firm yesterday accusing the firm of unlawfully taking credit for Duvall's work.

Duvall's widow, Kathryn Duvall, accused Washington-based Kenyon & Kenyon of conspiring to not give Duvall credit on the latest edition of a legal text he first wrote more than 20 years ago. In the complaint, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Kathryn Duvall called the firm's claims that the updated text no longer included her husband's writings "frivolous" and said the firm was trying to cut her family off from future royalties.

The firm and four individual attorneys are named as defendants. Partner Edward Colbert, who isn't a defendant, said that they were "taken aback" by the complaint. He said the publisher, and not Duvall or his family, owned the copyright to the text, and that the firm wrote the latest edition at the request of the publisher. The text had been "substantially altered" over the years, he added.

Federal Reserve Attorney Grilled on Too Big to Fail

By Jenna Greene

Members of the House Committee on Financial Services pressed the top lawyer from the Federal Reserve about when and how the government could break up financial institutions–and seemed less than satisfied with his answers.

During an April 16 hearing, committee members grilled Federal Reserve General Counsel Scott Alvarez on how regulators would decide whether a megabank posed “a grave threat to the financial stability of the United States.” Such a determination under Section 121 the Dodd-Frank Act gives the government the power to force the bank to sell assets or to break the bank up into pieces.

The problem for some lawmakers is that the Federal Reserve has not defined what constitutes a “grave threat,” and according Alvarez, it is not likely to do so. “That would be a determination that would depend very much on the facts and circumstances of the case,” he said. “It is very difficult to have a uniform rule.”

That didn’t sit well with Representative Sean Duffy (R – Wis.). “You don’t have standards, you don’t have metrics…and you have no intention of setting standards,” he said. “If we want to breed stability in the sector, certainty within the sector, does your standard ‘I’ll know it when I see it’ breed that?”

Report Highlights Need for Lawyers in D.C. Family Court

Updated at 3:51 p.m.

A task force of family law attorneys in Washington released a new report yesterday calling for expanded legal services for the growing population of unrepresented litigants in domestic relations and paternity and child support cases.

The D.C. Bar Family Law Task Force spent more than three years studying operations in the domestic relations and paternity and child support branches of the District of Columbia Superior Court. Task force co-chair Margaret McKinney, a founding partner of Washington's Delaney McKinney, said expanding access to legal representation stood out as a need.

The task force's recommendations included allowing lawyers to enter limited appearances in cases and expanding self-help resources available at the courthouse. McKinney said the response from court officials had been positive.