Biglaw, Kevin Newsom, Musical Chairs, Supreme Court, Supreme Court Clerks

Musical Chairs: Alabama SG Kevin Newsom to Bradley Arant

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All of this porn talk is making us feel dirty. So let’s turn our attention to more wholesome subjects.
Like the squeaky-clean Kevin Newsom, a devoted husband and father, and one of the country’s best appellate advocates. Newsom — who clerked for our former boss, Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain (9th Cir.), and Justice David H. Souter — currently serves as the Solicitor General of Alabama. The American Lawyer recently picked Newsom as one of the country’s top young litigators:

Kevin Newsom is only 34 and now practices far from the appellate hotbed of Washington, D.C., where he once worked as a Covington & Burling associate. Although he’s lost the three cases he’s argued so far before the U.S. Supreme Court, the former clerk for Justice David Souter nevertheless draws raves from leading appellate advocates. “He’s really, really good,” says Carter Phillips of Sidley Austin; another Supreme Court regular says that Newsom writes briefs with a novelist’s sense of language. His fellow Supreme Court clerks voted him the lawyer they’d hire if they needed an advocate. As Alabama’s SG, Newsom has argued nine cases in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. He’s won seven—and the other two are pending.

Well, we’ve just learned that Newsom is moving on from the SG’s office. From a tipster:

Alabama SG Kevin Newsom will be joining the Birmingham law firm of Bradley Arant Rose & White. BARW now has three former SC clerks working in their appellate litigation section and appears to have cornered the market on this kind of work in the southeast.

Overall, this has been a good legal year for the state. UA law just jumped to 36 in the US News rankings, and earlier this year we hosted Richard Epstein and Justice Alito (Cass Sunstein, Justice Breyer, & Justice Thomas visited last year). Emory may be seen as the most undervalued law school, but we will have more grads on the COA this upcoming year (4).

We have confirmed this news with Newsom, so it’s more than just rumor. Check out his gracious statement to ATL, after the jump.


From an email we received from Kevin Newsom:

Your sources (which — gasp! — apparently extend into middle America) are correct. Probably sometime in June or July, I’ll formally take my leave as the SG and head up the road to Birmingham, where I’ll co-chair the appellate practice group at Bradley, Arant, Rose & White. It’s a bittersweet move.

The SG gig has, in many ways, been the job of a lifetime. I’ve had opportunities here during the last three years that I really couldn’t have dreamed of anywhere else. (God bless then-AG-and-now-uber-Judge Bill Pryor for hiring me, and now-AG Troy King, when he came on board, for not firing me!)

I am, though, very excited about the opportunities at Bradley. It’s really a terrifically talented bunch of lawyers (warning: marketing pitch approaching).

I’ll make the fourth U.S. Supreme Court clerk in the appellate group (Wayne Drinkwater, Burger OT 1976; Matt Lembke, Kennedy OT 1992; and John Neiman, who’s returning to full-time practice from a law-teaching stint, Kennedy OT 2001). And Scott Smith, who clerked for Sixth Circuit Judge Gilbert Merritt about 10 years back, has already established himself as one of the leading private appellate lawyers in the Southeast.

It’s a great situation — if I can make it even a tiny bit better, I’ll feel like I’ve really accomplished something. And, I should say, Birmingham (my hometown) will be an absolutely wonderful place to raise my two boys.

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This sounds like a match made in heaven. Our congratulations to both Kevin Newsom and Bradley Arant!
Earlier: Congratulations to the Fab Fifty: A Constellation of Young Legal Superstars

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