Squire Launches Atlanta Public Affairs Practice With Veteran Political Lawyer
Amol Naik, who was the chief resilience officer for Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and a government affairs leader for Google, rejoins former colleagues at Squire Patton Boggs.
January 14, 2020 at 04:14 PM
5 minute read
Squire Patton Boggs has hired Amol Naik as the first public policy lawyer in its two-year-old Atlanta office.
Naik, 40, is a veteran public policy and political lawyer who most recently was the chief resiliency officer for the city of Atlanta under Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms. He joined Squire as a principal in its global public policy practice on Monday.
His move gives Squire 16 lawyers in Atlanta, handling transactional, litigation, data privacy and infrastructure matters and, now, public policy, one of the firm's key practices. Squire added infrastructure finance partner G. Scott Rafshoon from Hunton Andrews Kurth in October.
Naik said in an interview that he welcomed the opportunity to extend Squire's nationally known public practice to the firm's Atlanta office. He said he will be building the practice in Georgia and throughout the Southeast, working closely with Squire's Washington, D.C., team.
Naik's move to Squire reunites him with former colleagues from McKenna Long & Aldridge (a firm now part of Dentons), where he first started practicing law in 2005. He had worked with the McKenna-turned-Dentons partners who founded Squire's Atlanta office, led by local managing partner Ann-Marie McGaughey, more than a decade ago at McKenna.
McGaughey said in a statement that Naik "has deep connections to business and political leaders across Atlanta and the country," and he adds "a unique element to our growing Atlanta office."
Naik's diverse public policy experience includes handling Atlanta political campaigns and helping to build Google's Washington, D.C., government affairs practice. He said he got interested in politics and public policy while in law school at Emory University. After graduating, he joined McKenna Long, an Atlanta firm with strong practices in those areas.
In law school, Naik had started volunteering for political candidates, and as a 3L he landed a full-time gig as chief of staff to Georgia Senate Minority Leader Robert Brown. At McKenna, he served as the political lawyer for a number of election campaigns, including former state Sen. Jason Carter, (a partner at Bondurant Mixson & Elmore) former state Rep. and mayoral adviser Rashad Taylor, and former Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed's hotly contested 2009 election campaign against then-Atlanta City Councilwoman Mary Norwood.
That prompted the Daily Report to name Naik one of its On the Rise picks in 2010, when he was just 31.
Naik's work at McKenna led to a job in 2011 at Google, which was just starting its Washington lobbying operation and needed a political lawyer to set up the legal infrastructure. "I enjoyed the legal work, and I was exposed to a lot of really fascinating global compliance issues, since the company was growing so quickly," said Naik, who was corporate counsel on Google's global ethics and compliance team.
After three years in D.C., Naik returned to Atlanta as Google's government affairs point man for the Southeast and then became Google Fiber's regional head of external affairs, working on issues including privacy, driverless cars and drones.
After a stint as an in-house lawyer at MailChimp, where he set up the framework for the Atlanta-based tech company's public affairs and policy functions, Naik, who'd been volunteering for Bottoms' 2017 mayoral race, was named to her transition team after she won a hard-fought runoff, like Reed, against Norwood.
Bottoms made him the city's chief resilience officer in July 2018. Naik headed a 25-person team in the wide-ranging role, handling Atlanta's sustainability and smart cities technology efforts as well as LGBTQ, diversity and inclusion, human trafficking and immigrant affairs. Naik also led the adoption of the city's Clean Energy Atlanta plan, which commits the city to using 100% clean energy by 2035.
As one of only six direct reports to the mayor and one of her cabinet members, Naik said he gained a bird's eye view of how the city runs. "It's a complicated enterprise," he said.
Naik has also been active in the Atlanta political and business community, serving on the boards of the Georgia Chamber of Commerce, Metro Atlanta Chamber and Technology Association of Georgia and as the City of Atlanta's citizen commissioner for the Atlanta Regional Commission.
Last July Naik took a break from his career to focus on family. His mother had developed early onset Alzheimer's disease, and Naik and his fiance moved to his hometown, Lumberton, North Carolina, to help his father and sister care for her. "I'd been very career-oriented. It was time to pitch in," he said.
Upon his return to Atlanta, Naik decided to return to private practice at Squire. "I've been like a Swiss army knife in my career," Naik said, handling public policy, lobbying and legal work. "At Squire, I can use my skills in all three areas to be helpful to clients."
"They have an incredible public policy team and it's exciting to grow the Atlanta office for a global law firm," he said.
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