Vivian Maese, partner with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft (Courtesy photo)

Vivian Maese, most recently co-chair of Latham & Watkins' financial institutions and fintech practice groups, has joined the partnership of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York, the firm was expected to announce Monday.

Maese is a financial industry veteran, having worked in a variety of in-house roles at Wall Street banks and trading institutions including Salomon Brothers, Citibank, The New York Stock Exchange, Morgan Stanley and BIDS Trading, where she served as general counsel.

Her in-house career focused on helping those companies adopt technologies within the confines of financial regulation.

Maese launched her private practice in 2011 at Dechert, where she led the firm's global outsourcing and offshoring practice, providing transactional and regulatory advice on technology deals. She then joined Latham in 2014, where she helped develop the firm's fintech practice.

Cadwalader hired her to bolster the firm's financial regulatory practice with a focus on advising fintech companies, including startups based in New York.

“From a regulatory point of view, Cadwalader is best in class,” Maese said in an interview. “So what I bring to them is an understanding of the regulatory context, but also the technology depth that goes with that and an understanding of the operations. It just seemed like, if I could take my personal career up the next level, Cadwalader would be the right place for that.”

Maese's new firm has taken a different direction in the Am Law 100 compared with Latham.

Cadwalader saw head count and revenue drops from 2015 to 2017. Cadwalader in 2017 brought in $408.1 million in gross revenue, down from $481.5 million in 2014. But with a smaller firm, Cadwalader's profits per partner shot up by 18.6 percent to $2.51 million in 2017.

Latham, meanwhile, reached a new revenue record of $3.06 billion in 2017, supported by a nearly 7 percent surge in attorney head count. Its profits per partner in 2017 grew 6 percent to $3.25 million.

Cadwalader managing partner Patrick Quinn has said the firm is redoubling its focus on its core clients including financial institutions, large corporations and funds. Last October, in one indication of that strategy, a nine-attorney group representing health care providers and nonprofit institutions decamped for Crowell & Moring.

While it has shed some tangential practices, Cadwalader U.S. offices last year added some big-name financial industry partners, including Stephen Fraidin, a former vice chairman of Pershing Square Capital Management and former Sidley Austin antitrust leader Joel Mitnick. The firm also brought on Pearl Yuan-Garg, formerly counsel at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Mark Chorazak, previously counsel at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett; and former Moore & Van Allen litigation partner Jonathan Watkins.

“Vivian has few peers when it comes to her work in the fintech space, and our firm practices at the forefront of innovation in financial services,” Quinn said in a statement. “Our financial services clients continue to seek the kind of guidance on their deals and regulatory responsibilities that only a lawyer like Vivian and a firm like Cadwalader can provide.”

As for Maese, she has been a supporter of blockchain technologies in the law, commenting last year when Latham joined the Global Legal Blockchain Consortium that it was important to “unleash blockchain's full potential in the legal field.” She said she would be interested in helping Cadwalader adopt new technologies.

“I think we as lawyers who are senior in the profession owe it to the people coming up in the profession to be ahead of the curve and have them step into a New World-ready, best-in-class kind of firm that operates with a different technology core,” Maese said.