Trio of Big Law Firms Hire Antitrust Partners as Demand Grows

Three top U.S. law firms, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, and Latham & Watkins, announced Monday they hired antitrust partners, signaling growing demand as regulators more closely scrutinize potential anticompetitive behavior.

The four new hires have government antitrust enforcement experience that could be useful for clients facing an anticipated growth in scrutiny under the Biden administration and public debate about “breaking up” Big Tech and other industries.

According to data from Decipher, which performs due diligence for law firm hires, between November 2020 and January 2021 there have been 80% more antitrust lateral moves announced by Big Law compared to an average of the same period from the previous three years.

Wilson Sonsini’s Monday announcement said it had hired a new antitrust partner in San Francisco, Brent Snyder, who was most recently CEO of the Hong Kong Competition Commission. Before that he spent nearly 15 years with the U.S. Department of Justice, including as its top-ranking criminal antitrust enforcement attorney.

Gibson Dunn said it has hired two Baker Botts lawyers in Washington as partners, both former officials from the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition.

Stephen Weissman was deputy director of the antitrust bureau from 2013 to 2015 and later was a section chair for Baker Botts’s antitrust and competition law practice. Michael J. Perry moved to Baker Botts after serving as counsel to the director of the Bureau of Competition from 2015 to 2016.

Latham & Watkins also drew from the FTC’s antitrust arm, picking up its former director, Ian Conner in Washington, who took the reins as Bureau of Competition director in 2019 after joining the agency two years earlier. Under his tenure, the FTC sued the likes of Facebook Inc. and “pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.