Sedgwick Chair Joins Shook Hardy

Over the New Year’s weekend, Michael F. Healy moved little more than a block away to a new law firm, Shook Hardy & Bacon. Healy spent his career at Sedgwick LLP, rising to chairman before the San Francisco firm closed last month and its attorneys began to move on to other firms.

“I was the last to leave,” said Healy in an interview from his new office near San Francisco’s financial district.

He landed as a partner the international product liability defense firm’s litigation practice. He moved to Shook with two other former Sedgwick lawyers, Wayne A. Wolff and Emily M. Weissenberger, who will also be working on product liability, mass tort and complex litigation cases in the life sciences, pharmaceutical, and medical device areas.

Major litigation Healy worked on included defending DePuy Orthopedics—a division of Johnson & Johnson—whose ASR hip replacement devices were challenged because of their high failure rate and were later recalled.

Sedgwick announced last month that it would be closing its doors after some eight decades. The firm’s demise followed a series of partner departures and a decline in revenues. Some 80 former Sedgwick lawyers were hired by Clyde & Co, a major London-based law firm specializing in insurance.

“At the end of the day, almost every lawyer had a job of their choosing,” said Healy. Firm leaders spent “a fair amount of time finding landing spots for our lawyers and staff,” he said.

Healy, 63, had been with Sedgwick since 1980.

“I had worked with Shook defending clients and on the opposite side of cases. I have known the firm my entire career,” he noted.

He also worked with Alicia J. Donahue, the co-chair of Shook’s product liability practice. Before joining Shook in 2000, she was employed at Sedgwick where she worked along with Healy on a variety of drug and device cases. She, for example, tried five cases on behalf of individuals who claimed they were victims of the Dalkon shield, a contraceptive intrauterine device.

Shook was founded in 1889 and has 12 offices in the United States and London.

Healy, who also headed Sedgwick’s life sciences practice group, said he had been impressed in the past by Shook’s “sophisticated and innovative defense strategies and results in the many litigations where we have crossed paths over the years.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Olson in Maryland at egolson1@gmail.com.

To contact the editors on this story: Casey Sullivan in New York at csullivan@bloomberglaw.com and Nicholas Datlowe at ndatlowe@bloomberglaw.com.