Ivan Knauer, the co-chairman of Pepper Hamilton's securities and financial services enforcement group in Washington, D.C., is moving West to join Snell & Wilmer in its Salt Lake City office.

Knauer, who officially joined the firm earlier this month as a partner in its commercial litigation group, said the move was both a professional and personal one.

“I've been at Pepper Hamilton for a long time, [and] I've been in Washington for 24 years,” he said. “I was feeling like I was ready for a bit of a change.”

Knauer, who specializes in representing public and investment companies in securities litigation and enforcement, began his career at Ropes & Gray in 1989.

Six years later, he became senior counsel in the division of enforcement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. After three years at the SEC, he practiced at K&L Gates and Bingham McCutchen before heading to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority as vice president and managing trial counsel of its enforcement department in 2006.

Two years later he joined Pepper Hamilton in Washington.

For some time, Knauer said that he had been shuffling between D.C. and his home in Park City, Utah, an adjacent suburb of Salt Lake City. And while he very much enjoyed working at Pepper Hamilton, the Philadelphia-based firm wasn't going to open an office in Utah.

So Knauer went searching for a new home, cold-calling firms in the Salt Lake City area, and ultimately landed on Snell & Wilmer. (The firm lured another East Coast lawyer to one of its western offices earlier this month, when Boston bomber prosecutor Aloke “Al” Chakravarty joined in Denver.)

“We started having a conversation and the more I learned about them the more I was impressed with the firm,” said Knauer.

Snell & Wilmer first opened offices in Salt Lake City in 1991 and currently houses close to 60 attorneys, making it the Phoenix-based firm's third-largest office.

“Salt Lake City is a growing vibrant business community, [and] Utah is a very business-friendly state,” Knauer said.

The city is home to a booming startup business community, in what is known as the “Silicon Slopes.”

“It's a high-tech corridor in the Salt Lake City area that tends to feed off the energy, the learning and the intellectual property that's developed at the various universities in the area,” said Knauer. As these companies grow, they help expand the economy and, in turn, the legal market.

Knauer said that the local office of the SEC in Salt Lake City is aggressively investigating securities infractions and violations in and around the city and the West. This allows Knauer to not only serve as an advocate for clients being investigated by the office, but also to work with clients interacting with the SEC anywhere in the Mountain West or D.C., where he will also spend some time for the firm.

“I'm not skiing off into the sunset,” he joked. “I really am just shifting my geography a little bit to the west, but still continuing to have a connection to D.C., where I've lived and worked for 24 years.”