G. Scott Rafshoon. (Photo: John Disney/ALM)

Less than two years after opening its Atlanta office, Squire Patton Boggs has hired infrastructure finance partner G. Scott Rafshoon from Hunton Andrews Kurth.

The move to Squire this month reunites Rafshoon with some former colleagues from McKenna Long & Aldridge, which was acquired by Dentons in July 2015. In early 2018, corporate partners Ann-Marie McGaughey, Wayne Bradley and litigation partner Petrina McDaniel left Dentons with four associates to launch an Atlanta office for Squire, with McGaughey serving as the local managing partner.

Rafshoon, who has a public-private partnership, or P3, practice, said he had worked closely with McGaughey and Bradley over his 21-year career at McKenna and then Dentons, before departing for Hunton two years ago.

After he joined McKenna's predecessor firm, Long Aldridge & Norman, as a first-year associate in 1995, Rafshoon said, he received a lot of his training from Bradley and McGaughey. "It's an opportunity to work again with people I'd worked with for over 20 years, who are colleagues and close friends," he said.

"Hunton is a terrific firm with great lawyers, but Ann-Marie and Wayne are lawyers I've worked on business development and deals with for two decades. When they offered me the opportunity to join them, I didn't want to pass that up," Rafshoon said, adding that he was also attracted by the prospect of helping them build Squire's Atlanta office.

Rafshoon is the 15th lawyer for Squire's steadily growing Atlanta location, following the firm's addition in September of Glenn Brown as of counsel to its data privacy and cybersecurity practice from LexisNexis Risk Solutions, where he was chief regulatory compliance officer and associate general counsel.

"Having personally known Scott for more than two decades, he is a true team player whose work ethic, collaborative nature and client-first approach meshes well with our firm values and culture," McGaughey said in an announcement.

P3 Practice

Rafshoon, 55, focuses his P3 practice on social infrastructure transactions, representing developers and sponsors in privatizations of housing and other concessions by military bases, public universities and other government entities at the federal and state levels.

He started working about 15 years ago on deals to privatize military housing, which he said were an early example of public-private partnerships in the U.S. GMH Communities Trust was a major initial client for Rafshoon for military housing deals. U.K. company Balfour Beatty bought GMH's military housing division in 2008, and Rafshoon has continued to represent Balfour Beatty on university housing and other privatization deals.

Other clients include Clark Realty Capital and Lendlease Corp., and he's represented University Student Living in a housing deal with University of California, Davis.

Rafshoon said that public universities and colleges have expanded beyond housing infrastructure privatization deals to sports centers, cafeterias and other types of infrastructure—and that private universities have also started using the financing mechanism.

"People think of P3 as mostly in roads and bridges, but that has been slower to take off," he said. "In social infrastructure, there was a lot going on two years ago—and a whole lot more going on now."

He's working on one project now in California where his client is developing housing and commercial properties on a former military base now owned by NASA.

At a P3 higher education conference last week in San Diego, Rafshoon said, he found that he and his new Squire partners knew a lot of the same people—and were able to make new introductions for each other. "We talk the same language about issues. It gave me a good feeling," he said.

Daniel G. Berick, the Americas chair for Squire's global corporate practice, said in a statement that Rafshoon's P3 experience will add to the firm's growing practice in that area. "Facing a $2 trillion [U.S.] infrastructure investment deficit, the U.S. is at a crucial intersection in its approach to project procurement, development and finance," he said. "With the P3 approach gaining ground, Scott's extensive experience and expertise, particularly in the social infrastructure space, places us among the leaders in this market."