Cooley has welcomed aboard White & Case partner Kenneth Juster as the West Coast firm seeks to bolster its financial services regulatory practice in Boston and expand its East Coast bench.

For Juster, it was Cooley's financial technology or “fintech” platform that drove him to make the jump to the fast-growing Am Law 100 firm, which crossed the $1 billion gross revenue mark in 2017.

“Right now there's just so much innovation in the market and so many exciting things happening and I think Cooley is perfectly positioned to capitalize on that,” said Juster, who joined White & Case in May 2017 as a partner in its global capital markets practice.

“I think it's just an ideal fit for me to focus more in the fintech space,” Juster said.

The new Cooley partner's practice extends across a range of financial services regulatory matters, including laws and regulations applicable to investment advisers, broker-dealers, alternative trading systems and securities trading.

Juster also works with emerging and established companies on the development and operation of funding portals and online capital-raising platforms, including in the angel investing, venture capital and crowdfunding space.

After several years working in-house for institutional broker-dealers in New York, Juster joined K&L Gates in Boston as an associate in 2008.

A year later Juster joined independent broker-dealer LPL Financial LLC, where he served as regulatory counsel before returning to K&L Gates in 2010. Juster made partner at K&L Gates four years later before moving to White & Case last year.

Over the years, Juster has worked with lawyers at Cooley when broker-dealer regulatory advice was needed and partnered with them to provide those services to their clients.

“[Juster] is a respected authority across a range of financial services regulatory matters, from broker-dealer law to funding platforms to blockchain, and he has worked closely with Cooley partners and our clients on many high-profile matters,” said Alfred Browne, partner and co-chair of Cooley's fintech practice, in a statement announcing Juster's hire.

Browne, who began his legal career at now-defunct Boston firm Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, was one of 10 partners that opened Cooley's office in the city's Bay Back neighborhood in 2007, having joined the firm from Boston-based Sullivan & Worcester. Since then Cooley has grown to nearly 70 lawyers in Boston, which in recent months has become a hotspot for Big Law hiring.

In moving to Cooley, Juster said he looks forward to working with its entrepreneurial and innovative client base and helping the firm build out its financial regulatory capabilities.

“[There are] rapidly growing startups and people who are doing really cool disruptive things in the financial markets that a lot of firms just aren't working with,” he said.

Cooley, which in 2006 joined forces with New York-based litigation boutique Kronish Lieb Weiner & Hellman, has been busy adding to its East Coast bench.

In August, the firm brought on former Boies Schiller Flexner partner Philip Bowman to grow its litigation practice in New York, only a month after it recruited longtime Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in-house lawyer Jonathan Kim for its commercial litigation group in the city.

Cooley also added Eric Kuwana, a former chair of Katten Muchin Rosenman's securities litigation and enforcement practice, in May as a partner in New York and Washington, D.C.

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