Morgan Lewis Adds Partners From PwC, SDNY Criminal Division (1)

Morgan Lewis has hired a former managing director of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ national tax services practice, Daniel Carmody, and Daniel Tehrani, the former deputy chief of the appeals unit for the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

The dual partner hires were announced on Monday.

Tehrani has worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in Manhattan for nearly a decade. The Harvard Law School graduate had previously been an associate in Jenner & Block’s Washington and New York offices. He will remain based in New York and work on government investigations, litigation, and internal investigations.

Carmody, who will be based in Philadelphia, practiced at Morgan Lewis earlier in his career in two separate stints. He spent 6.5 years at the IRS National Office before he became a Morgan Lewis associate in 2005. He spent another nearly four years at the IRS from 2009 to 2012, and then rejoined Morgan Lewis in an of counsel role.

Carmody joined PwC’s tax services team in late 2015. He served as a specialist on partnership taxation issues at the Big Four accountancy.

Carmody’s hire comes as Big Law firms reckon with Big Four accounting giants that are seeking to grow their business in the legal services market. While PwC, Ernst & Young, KPMG and Deloitte are barred from practicing law in the U.S., they compete in international markets. There are also proposals in several U.S. states to loosen or scrap rules that limit law firm ownership to lawyers, which may open the door to greater competition with the Big Four.

PwC’s global legal services network has more than 3,500 lawyers in more than 220 cities. PwC also has an affiliated U.S. law firm, ILC Legal, which connects clients to the PwC network’s lawyers around the globe.

Law firms and accounting firms have long competed and cooperated with each other in the tax practice. That was Carmody’s experience, he said, as he often worked side-by-side with Morgan Lewis and other law firms.

Carmody, in a phone interview, said he couldn’t draw any conclusions as to whether the Big Four would become a threat to law firms outside the tax practice. He said he looked forward to working on deals with PwC.

“From the very narrow tax perspective, the law firms and accounting firms do occupy the same space,” the attorney said. “There will always be some level of competition. As an attorney, we are all interested in whether the Big Four will become competitors outside of tax. But that is something I’m interested in.”

Tehrani said in an interview that he was drawn to Morgan Lewis because of its growth and the depth of experience in its white collar practice. The firm has added a number of white collar lawyers this year, including Matt Miner, a former deputy assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, and former U.S. Attorneys Zane Memeger and Kenneth Polite.

“It was everything that I was looking for to join a team that was doing excellent work, that was growing, and also is fundamentally collaborative,” Tehrani said.