Stephen Cutler, a former general counsel and current vice chairman at JPMorgan Chase & Co., is poised to leave the financial services giant and join Simpson Thacher & Bartlett in April as a litigation partner in New York.

“It's an outstanding firm and over the last decade I've actually worked with them and gotten to know a number of their lawyers,” said Cutler, whose return to private practice was first reported Wednesday by The Wall Street Journal. Cutler will officially step down from JPMorgan at the end of March.

Cutler first joined JPMorgan in February 2007 as general counsel after leaving Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where he served as co-chair of the firm's securities department in Washington, D.C. He took over from Joan Guggenheimer, a veteran legal adviser to banking industry titans, following her death from cancer in 2006. Cutler, 45 at the time, assumed the top legal role at JPMorgan on the eve of the 2008 financial crisis.

Cutler subsequently oversaw JPMorgan's $236 million buy of The Bear Stearns Cos. in March 2008 and its $1.9 billion acquisition the following September of assets from failing Washington Mutual Inc. Over the next few years, Cutler helped guide JPMorgan through some of the roughest points in Wall Street history, including JPMorgan's $13 billion settlement in 2013 with the U.S. Department of Justice over the bank's role in selling mortgage-backed securities before the abrupt economic downturn a decade ago.

Those legal woes helped generate big fees for a handful of outside firms, including Wilmer, Sullivan & Cromwell and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, as well as Simpson Thacher, a longtime outside legal adviser to JPMorgan.

Following the sudden death in 2015 of JPMorgan vice chairman James Lee Jr., Cutler was elevated to vice chairman and senior adviser to the banking giant's board of directors and CEO Jamie Dimon. Stacey Friedman, a former litigation and regulatory partner at Sullivan & Cromwell who joined JPMorgan in 2012, succeeded Cutler as general counsel in 2016.

In his new role at Simpson Thacher, Cutler said that he hopes to use some of his decades of experience in the banking and in-house world to shed light on what general counsel and senior management go through when confronting a problem.

“I always tried to practice no matter where I was—whether it was in private practice, in government and here at JPMorgan—to practice by thinking about being in the other person's shoes,” Cutler said. “At this point, I've been in some of those shoes and I hope that's helpful to the way that I could counsel clients.”

Prior to his in-house career, Cutler spent 11 years at Wilmer before joining the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 1999 as deputy director. In 2001, he became director of the SEC's Division of Enforcement, where Cutler led the regulator's investigations into the failures of Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. before rejoining Wilmer in 2005.

As a part of his practice at Simpson Thacher, Cutler said that he plans on continuing to work on many of the same issues—internal and government investigations, corporate governance matters and crisis management—while using his experience to build on the firm's litigation practice. And despite spending more than a decade in-house, Cutler doesn't have any qualms about making the jump back to Big Law.

“I really like being a lawyer and if you would asked me a couple years after I got to JPMorgan what do you miss about private practice, I could've ticked off four or five things,” he said. “So for me, this is really exciting and I'm looking forward to the next chapter.”

Cutler is the second lateral partner recruit by Simpson Thacher so far this year. Earlier this month, the Am Law 100 firm welcomed back Keith Noreika, who returned to the firm's financial institutions practice after seven months as acting head of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, D.C.

Simpson Thacher also made a rare raid on a rival firm in November by bringing on Sullivan & Cromwell restructuring partner Michael Torkin in New York. That move subsequently resulted in litigation between a legal recruiter and Simpson Thacher over a $937,000 fee for orchestrating the high-profile hire.