Toll Brothers, AECOM Go In-House for Top Lawyers

Two top U.S. builders have promoted a pair of former deputy general counsels to lead their respective law departments.

A spokeswoman for Horsham, Pa.-based Toll Brothers Inc. confirmed Monday that Timothy Hoban was appointed general counsel. Hoban, whose Feb. 13 promotion hasn’t been publicly announced, didn’t respond to a request for comment about his new position.

Across the country, Los Angeles-based AECOM has installed a new legal chief in David Gan.

Hoban has spent the past several years as a senior vice president and chief litigation counsel at Toll Brothers, which is one of the largest U.S. home builders. He joined Toll Brothers during the height of the U.S. housing boom in 2005 as a regional in-house counsel in California, where Hoban started his legal career at the law firm’s Sidley Austin and Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis.

In January, former Toll Brothers general counsel John McDonald left the company to return to Cozen O’Connor as a litigation partner in Philadelphia. McDonald had previously left Cozen’s partnership in 2002 to join Toll Brothers, a client of his in private practice, as its chief litigation counsel. Toll Brothers promoted McDonald in 2007 to deputy general counsel and chief compliance officer and he took over the company’s general counsel role three years later from Mark Kessler.

In an annual proxy statement filed earlier this year, Toll Brothers disclosed that it paid more than $1.83 million in total compensation to McDonald in 2019. Toll Brothers was co-founded in 1967 by Robert Toll, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and his brother, businessman Bruce Toll. McCarter & English and Marshall Dennehey Warner Coleman & Goggin have handled more than 30% of the litigation work for Toll Brothers within the last five years, according to Bloomberg Law data.

AECOM’s In-House Changes

Gan, a former deputy general counsel at AECOM, is now listed as an executive vice president and chief legal officer on the engineering and construction management company’s website. Gan, who joined the company in 2006 after working at Mayer Brown and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, did not respond to a request for comment about his new role, nor did several AECOM media representatives.

A lawyer with knowledge of AECOM’s in-house operations told Bloomberg Law that Gan was announced internally late last year as the successor to AECOM’s former law department leader, Carla Christofferson, who in January was hired as chief risk officer for Tysons, Va.-based DXC Technology Co.

Christofferson’s exit came shortly after AECOM CEO Michael Burke announced his plans to retire from the company and prior to the early February completion of a spin-off of AECOM’s former management services division, an independent company now known as Amentum.

AECOM disclosed in a recent proxy statement that it paid more than $2.89 million in total compensation last year to Christofferson—nearly half of that sum in cash—and nearly $16 million to Burke. Bloomberg data shows that Christofferson still owns roughly $767,000 in AECOM stock.

Burke is a graduate of the Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles and was an executive at accounting firm KPMG LLP prior to becoming AECOM’s CFO in 2006 and CEO in 2014. He did not respond to a request for comment about the company’s law department hierarchy. At least four in-house lawyers at AECOM led by current Amentum general counsel Stuart Young have joined the Germantown, Md.-based company, a top contractor for the U.S. government.

Cravath, Swaine & Moore advised Amentum’s new private equity owners, American Securities LLC and Linsday Goldberg LLC, on their $2.4 billion purchase of the former AECOM unit in October. Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz represented AECOM on the divestiture.

National labor and employment law firms Jackson Lewis, Littler Mendelson, Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart, and Seyfarth Shaw have handled the bulk of AECOM’s litigation work during the last five years, according to Bloomberg Law data. Christofferson took over as AECOM’s general counsel in 2015.

Bloomberg News reported last week that AECOM is in talks to sell itself to Canadian engineering services rival WSP Global Inc.