Law firms recharged their practices with a range of high-wattage partner moves in 2017. It wasn't shocking that many of the new hires came from the outgoing Obama administration. But plugged-in practitioners of all kinds were in demand, from Silicon Valley dealmakers to law firm leaders to white-collar litigators. In a rare lateral move among law firm top leadership, DLA Piper global co-chair Juan Picón is joining Latham & Watkins as Madrid office head. The November announcement of Picón's move came just 18 months after he was appointed senior partner of DLA Piper International, the firm's operations outside of the United States. With Picón, a corporate partner and Spanish national, go two DLA Madrid partners, Spanish corporate head Jose Antonio Sanchez-Dafos and capital markets partner Ignacio Gómez-Sancha.

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Angela Styles joined Bracewell on Oct. 30, 2017, as a government contracts partner in Washington, D.C., about a month after Styles was voted out of leadership at Crowell & Moring, where she practiced for 10 years. Styles said at the time that the move to Bracewell would give her the opportunity to "refocus on my practice," and she said she liked Bracewell's strategic focus on energy and technology because that fits well with her practice. With roots in Dallas, Styles added that she was excited to work at a firm with strong Texas roots. At Bracewell, Styles will help Robert Wagman, a partner who joined Bracewell in March to establish its government contracts practice, building out that group at the firm.

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Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer private equity star David Higgins joins Kirkland & Ellis as London co-managing partner. He will also take a role on the firm's global management executive committee. Higgins counts Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Hellman & Friedman, Cinven and Blackstone among his clients. In 2017, he headed up the Freshfields team advising Hellman & Friedman on its $5.3 billion takeover of Scandinavian payment service provider Nets, one of the largest European leveraged buyouts in the last five years.

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Richard "Rick" Climan, a well-traveled technology transactions lawyer in Silicon Valley, made the trip from Weil, Gotshal & Manges to Hogan Lovells. With him went fellow partners John Brockland, Keith Flaum and Jane Ross. The group headed to Weil nearly five years ago from now-defunct Dewey & LeBoeuf, which the four partners joined from Cooley in two separate moves in 2009. "This is part of a longer strategy to focus on key markets," said Hogan Lovells global corporate head David Gibbons. "We think Northern California is a critical market now and long-term."

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Paul Basta headed to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where the former Kirkland & Ellis management committee member now co-chairs his new firm's bankruptcy and corporate reorganization practice. At Kirkland, Basta represented a long list of distressed companies, including most recently Caesars Entertainment Operating Co., which Basta and Kirkland helped steer through a grueling two-year Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Kirkland ultimately billed more than $76 million in the case.

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Erica Berthou, global head of the investment management and funds group at Debevoise & Plimpton, left the firm with deputy corporate chair Jordan Murray to join Kirkland & Ellis as partners in New York. Berthou was also a member of Debevoise's management committee. In 2016 she led a team of Debevoise lawyers advising The Blackstone Group's GSO Capital Opportunities Fund III on its raising of a $6.5 billion fund from roughly 200 investors. The work was done in only five months, a tight time frame for such a massive fundraising.

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John "Jack" Sheridan, co-managing partner of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, joined Latham & Watkins as a corporate partner in the firm's emerging companies practice. Sheridan has worked on some of Silicon Valley's most iconic deals. He represented YouTube from its initial financing through its $1.65 billion acquisition by Google Inc. in 2006, as well as French enterprise software company Business Objects SA on its $7 billion sale to German software giant SAP AG the following year.

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Michael Darden, chair of the oil and gas transactions group and co-chair of the oil and gas industry team at Latham & Watkins, headed to Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher's new office in Houston. The move came seven years after Darden, formerly chair of the global oil and gas practice at Baker Botts, was part of a group of high-profile hires who helped Latham break into the Houston market.

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Longtime Vinson & Elkins energy partner and former China practice head Xiao Yong left the firm to join Dechert. With him went a team specializing in energy work that included partner Nicholas Song and counsel Zhaohui Li. A former government official, Xiao represents state-owned enterprises on outbound oil and gas deals and projects. In 2015, Xiao led the Vinson & Elkins team representing China Petrochemical Corp., or Sinopec, on a $1.3 billion deal to buy a 10 percent stake in Russian energy company Sibur.

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Linda Goldstein, the former head of the advertising, marketing and new media practice at Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, left the firm's New York office for Baker & Hostetler. Partner Holly Melton and three other attorneys joined Goldstein at her new firm. At Manatt, Goldstein represented clients in matters before the Federal Trade Commission and has also handled investigations into marketing and advertising practices by the regulator. Goldstein attributed her decision to join Baker & Hostetler to the firm's data security and privacy practice. "As data is becoming the currency for advertising and marketing, the convergence of that practice with our practice is inevitable," Goldstein said. "So I think that offers us a lot of opportunities to expand on both sides."

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Anthony Alexis, the former enforcement director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, joined Goodwin Procter, where he now leads the firm's consumer financial services enforcement practice. A former Mayer Brown partner, Alexis oversaw many of the CFPB's highest-profile enforcement actions, including the $100 million settlement with Wells Fargo & Co. over the bank's aggressive sales practices.

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Suedeen Kelly, co-chair of the energy regulatory, markets and enforcement practice at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, jumped to Jenner & Block as a partner in Washington, D.C. Kelly, a former commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during the presidential administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, focuses her practice on business, enforcement, litigation, policy and regulatory matters for clients in the electric and natural gas industries.

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O'Melveny & Myers hired DLA Piper corporate partner Charles "Chuck" Baker and Irwin Raij, co-chair of the sports industry team at Foley & Lardner, to chair O'Melveny's sports industry group. Baker is a veteran sports dealmaker who advised on the $850 million sale of the National Basketball Association's Atlanta Hawks in 2015. Raij's practice focuses on media rights and stadium development deals, as well as M&A work. The pair joined O'Melveny & Myers some two years after a high-profile team of sports and entertainment lawyers left the firm for Latham & Watkins.  

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With the addition of Kara Brockmeyer, Debevoise & Plimpton moved to corner the market on former chiefs from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Brockmeyer, former chief of the SEC Enforcement Division's Foreign Corrupt Practices Act unit, joins her former bosses—Mary Jo White, ex-chair of the SEC and now head of Debevoise's crisis response group, and Andrew Ceresney, former director of the SEC Enforcement Division and now co-chair of the firm's litigation department.

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James Woolery took his fourth new job in six years when he joined King & Spalding in New York last spring. The mergers and acquisitions partner left Cravath, Swaine & Moore in 2011 to join JPMorgan Chase & Co. as co-head of North American M&A, then joined Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in early 2013, where he was set to become the firm's chairman in 2015. But shortly before then, Woolery resigned to start a hedge fund called Hudson Executive Capital. He left the fund after two years, in fall 2016. Woolery will be head of M&A at King & Spalding and a member of the corporate governance practice."I've had experience in different fields: law, investment banking and hedge funds [and] what I was really interested in is where can I deploy the entirety of that experience," said Woolery.

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Allen Parker, a longtime Cravath, Swaine & Moore lawyer who had recently stepped down as presiding partner of the firm, became general counsel of Wells Fargo & Co. Parker's move not only represents a rare loss of a partner for Cravath, but a vote of confidence in the banking lawyer's ability to steer Wells Fargo's comeback from a scandal that saw it pay $185 million to resolve claims it opened sham accounts without customers' permission.

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Kenneth Wainstein left Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, where he was co-chair of the firm's litigation department and chair of the white-collar group, for another Wall Street mainstay, Davis Polk & Wardwell. Wainstein has represented a former assistant U.S. attorney accused of misconduct in the Ted Stevens case and Washington Wizards basketball player Gilbert Arenas, among other high-profile clients. Before his time in private practice, Wainstein was general counsel at the FBI and chief of staff to then-Director Robert Mueller III. He served as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, head of the National Security Division at the Justice Department, and assistant to President George W. Bush on Homeland Security and Counterterrorism matters.

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Sullivan & Cromwell took on a rare lateral partner in Renata Hesse, a former top official in the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division. Hesse, who twice served as acting head of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division, had a hand in the DOJ's review of a now-scuttled proposal by Comcast to buy rival Time Warner Cable Inc. for $45 billion, as well as the agency's look into a now-completed merger between US Airways Group Inc. and American Airlines parent AMR Corp.

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Four litigation partners jumped from Reed Smith to King & Spalding, led by John Hooper, co-head of Reed Smith's complex litigation group. The New York-based group, including Hooper, Kelly D'Auria, Eric Gladbach and Jacqueline Seidel, joined King & Spalding as partners in its tort and environmental practice. Hooper has worked on some of the most high-profile litigation matters in the last decade, as the strategic counsel and lead negotiator for Toyota's Takata MDL air bag litigation; co-lead negotiator for the Toyota unintended acceleration cases; and co-national counsel for C.R. Bard in hernia mesh mass tort MDL litigation.

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Beth Brinkmann, a deputy assistant attorney general who headed the Civil Division's appellate staff at the U.S. Department of Justice, chose Covington & Burling for her post-Obama administration landing. Brinkmann will be co-leader of the appellate practice with partner Robert Long. "We like the Supreme Court work and would like to do more of it, and we think Beth can help with that," Long said. Brinkmann, a former clerk to the late associate Justice Harry Blackmun, has argued 24 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Thomas Melsheimer, the managing partner of Fish & Richardson's Dallas office, left with eight other partners to co-found Winston & Strawn's Dallas office along with partners from seven other law firms in February 2017. Two months later, Fish & Richardson litigation head Katherine Vidal joined Winston as managing partner of its Menlo Park, California, office.  

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Zachary Fardon, former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, launched a Chicago office for King & Spalding, marking a surprising end to a highly competitive recruiting process that many presumed would see the former Latham & Watkins partner return to the firm he left in 2013.

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Longtime Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe intellectual property partner Neel Chatterjee joined Goodwin Procter's litigation department and intellectual property practice in its Silicon Valley office. Chatterjee, one of the most colorful IP lawyers in Silicon Valley—known for his creative Halloween costumes, and for standing outside the White House after the 2016 presidential election with signs offering "Free Hugs"—represented internet behemoths like Facebook Inc., eBay Inc., AOL Time Warner and Logitech in his 19 years as a partner at Orrick.

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Kirkland & Ellis raided Ropes & Gray for a five-partner investigations and government enforcement group in Asia, the U.K. and United States. The team includes Asheesh Goel, who left Kirkland in 2008 to open Ropes & Gray's office in Chicago, where he was the firm's local managing partner and co-chair of its global anti-corruption and international risk practice. Other lawyers leaving Ropes & Gray for Kirkland include New York-based securities and enforcement co-head Zachary Brez and government enforcement partners Kim Nemirow in Chicago, Cori Lable in Hong Kong and Marcus Thompson in London.

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Atlanta-based Alston & Bird scooped up litigator Michael Agoglia from Morrison & Foerster and a seven-lawyer class action defense team led by Robert "Bo" Phillips Jr. from Reed Smith to open a San Francisco office and expand its Los Angeles office. Agoglia co-chaired MoFo's financial services litigation team, while Phillips co-led Reed Smith's firmwide class action group.