Law360 featured the co-chairs of WilmerHale’s State Attorneys General Practice, Partners Brian Mahanna and Paul Connell, in an in-depth Q&A. The topics they discussed included the benefits of their bipartisan practice to clients, why state attorneys general are more active, the issues attracting the most attention from those officials and the insights both partners offer clients from their own experience as one-time senior officials in state attorneys general offices. Mahanna was deputy attorney general and chief of staff in the New York Attorney General’s office while Connell was Wisconsin’s chief deputy attorney general and senior counsel in that office.
Excerpt:
Why do you think it's important to have a bipartisan state AG practice?
Mahanna: Attorneys general are a combination of law enforcement officers, prosecutors and elected officials. As elected officials, they have campaigned on both partisan and nonpartisan issues. When you're interacting with them, you need to understand their motivations and how they think about the world and the problems that they seek to solve. Republicans and Democrats in this country think about certain issues somewhat differently. So clients need people who understand those perspectives, who have come from those offices, and can be good lawyers and good advocates.
Connell: Today, it's pretty rare that significant client issues are confined to one state. The kinds of issues that we address at WilmerHale cross state lines, and as a result, you're almost certainly going to encounter Republicans and Democrats working together. A company needs a fulsome defense that crosses party lines, understands what will motivate different AGs to settle and how to litigate against those offices throughout a case.