Seven Willkie Farr Partners Exit for Cooley After Trump Deal (1)

Seven partners left Willkie Farr & Gallagher, one of the nine firms that made a deal with President Donald Trump, to join Cooley’s litigation department in San Francisco.

In contrast to Willkie, Cooley lawyers including Michael Attanasio have been representing Jenner & Block in that firm’s successful effort to permanently strike down a Trump executive order as unconstitutional.

The seven are Simona Agnolucci, Ben Hur, Joshua Anderson, Tiffany Lin, Jonathan Patchen, Michael Rome and Eduardo Santacana, according to a Cooley statement. Agnolucci and Hur led Willkie’s San Francisco office and Agnolucci was a member of the firm’s executive committee.

“This continues the multiyear expansion of our elite litigation department,” Ian Shapiro, who leads the department for Cooley, said in the statement.

Law firms that pledged free legal services to Trump in order to avoid punitive executive orders have been seeing departures. Paul Weiss lost Jeh Johnson, the prominent Democrat and former Homeland Security Secretary, last month, and days later, a high-profile group of litigators, including Karen Dunn, Bill Isaacson, and Jeannie Rhee, hit the exit to launch their own firm. Kathleen Rubenstein, the Skadden Foundation’s executive director, resigned earlier this month.

“We wish them well,” a Willkie spokesperson said of the seven partners who left.

Willkie earlier this year hired Doug Emhoff, who is married to former Vice President Kamala Harris. Like other Big Law firms, it has handled pro bono cases that could be seen as antagonistic to Trump. The firm represented Georgia election workers who won a $148 million defamation verdict against Rudy Giuliani, a former lawyer for Trump, and has won victories protecting gender-affirming care in public health plans. Emhoff remains at the firm.

The New York Times first reported on the Willkie departures.