Biglaw

Prominent Supreme Court Lawyer Jumps From Kirkland & Ellis To Quinn Emanuel

Please note the UPDATE, featuring comment from the superstar litigator making the leap.

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Quinn Emanuel strikes again. Not long after hiring one of the nation’s top trial lawyers, Alex Spiro, away from Ben Brafman, the litigation powerhouse has snagged a leading Supreme Court and appellate advocate. Longtime Kirkland & Ellis partner Christopher Landau is leaving K&E to join Quinn.

Landau is a familiar figure to SCOTUS and appellate lawyers. A Harvard Law School graduate and former law clerk to then-Judge Clarence Thomas (on the D.C. Circuit) and Justice Antonin Scalia, Landau is a leading Supreme Court lawyer, with eight nine arguments under his belt. That’s an extremely impressive number, especially for someone who has never served in the Office of the Solicitor General.

Speaking of OSG, longtime Above the Law readers might recall that Landau was a prominent contender to serve as the Trump Administration’s first Solicitor General (before Noel Francisco of Jones Day got the job). Landau was also talked about as a possible appointment to the circuit court for which he once clerked (before Greg Katsas, another Jones Day alum, got the D.C. Circuit spot).

It’s not often that partners leave the incredibly prestigious and profitable Kirkland & Ellis. In recent years, K&E has been more the raider than the raided, using its deep coffers to hire superstars away from other top-tier Biglaw firms.

The obscenely profitable Quinn Emanuel — routinely the second-most-profitable Biglaw firm after Wachtell Lipton, with $5 million in profits per partner in 2016 — surely gave Landau a good financial deal. But I can’t help wondering whether more than money might be the issue here. (And as a partner at Kirkland, which boasts $4 million in PPP, Landau surely wasn’t starving.)

Christopher Landau (via Kirkland & Ellis)

For many years, Chris Landau was the big fish in K&E’s appellate pond. But in September 2016, former Solicitor General Paul Clement, viewed by many as the finest Supreme Court advocate of his generation, joined Kirkland. It’s quite possible that Landau wanted to escape from the shadow of Clement.

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(To be sure, Quinn Emanuel already has a top appellate lawyer in its ranks — name partner Kathleen Sullivan, who has argued nine eleven cases before SCOTUS — but she’s based out of New York and therefore less likely to take the D.C. spotlight away from Landau).

We reached out to Chris Landau and to Quinn Emanuel for comment but have not yet heard back. We’ll update this story if and when we do. In the meantime, congratulations to Landau on his new perch and to QE on its latest high-profile hire!

UPDATE (3:07 p.m.): Quinn Emanuel has been on quite the hiring spree in recent weeks. A reader just reminded me of another major pickup by QE: commercial litigator Luke Nikas, known especially for his expertise in disputes in the art world, who joined from Boies Schiller. (For more about Nikas’s move, see the American Lawyer, Law360, and Lawdragon.)

UPDATE (11:13 p.m.): Chris Landau reached out to me to confirm his move and provide the following statement:

I’m excited and delighted to confirm that I intend to join Quinn Emanuel. The firm’s appellate practice has grown tremendously since Kathleen Sullivan launched it a dozen years ago, and I look forward to helping continue that growth in the years to come. Kathleen was once my teacher in law school, and in the years since I haven’t met a finer lawyer or person. She and I share the belief that a successful appellate practice must be part and parcel of a firm’s overall litigation practice, and Quinn Emanuel provides a unparalleled platform for litigation at the highest level.

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Very true. This is why QE is the firm of choice for many companies and individuals (most recently Steve Bannon) who find themselves in major litigation, high-stakes investigations, and — with talent like Sullivan and Landau — big-ticket appellate matters.

UPDATE (1/12/2018, 3:39 p.m.): Additional coverage of Landau’s hiring is available at Big Law Business (noting that he successfully represented a group of federal judges who sued over unconstitutional deprivation of salary adjustments) and Law360 (noting that Landau spent 25 years at Kirkland, and quoting Kathleen Sullivan as “thrilled” about his arrival and eager to begin their work together.)

Also, the SCOTUS argument counts for Landau and Sullivan have been corrected to reflect updated tallies.

Earlier:

DBL square headshotDavid Lat is editor at large and founding editor of Above the Law, as well as the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].

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