Paul Fishman, who served as U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey for more than seven years before the Trump administration sought his resignation last year, is joining Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer as a partner in New York.

Fishman will lead Arnold & Porter's crisis management and strategic response team, focusing his practice on internal investigations, compliance counseling, white-collar criminal defense, complex civil litigation, and appellate advocacy.

“After a pretty long period of time in public service, I wanted to find a firm that would let me serve clients in the way I thought the law should be practiced,” Fishman said.

“Arnold & Porter is a firm that has an extraordinary reputation, both with client service and for the way in which it views lawyers' responsibility to society—and that's true for the Kaye Scholer half of the firm too,” Fishman added, citing Arnold & Porter's 2017 merger with New York-centered Kaye Scholer.

President Barack Obama appointed Fishman to the U.S. attorney position in 2009. President Donald Trump requested his resignation last March, along with 45 other federal prosecutors appointed by the prior administration.

Fishman joined the faculty at Seton Hall University School of Law as a distinguished visiting fellow soon after leaving his post. He said he spent several months looking at different firms—he declined to name them—before committing to Arnold & Porter.

While all U.S. attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and changes in administrations always mean turnover at the Department of Justice, Fishman said he found the timing of Trump's request surprising. But Fishman, who said he counts former U.S. Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch as personal friends, said, “I fully expected to leave my job as U.S. attorney when the [2016] election came out the way it did.”

From 1994 to 1997, Fishman served as a senior adviser to former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, who requested resignations from all U.S. attorneys in the early going of President Bill Clinton's administration.

Fishman spent several decades in public service, including from 1983 to 1994 as an assistant U.S. attorney. Before returning to public service as U.S. attorney, he was a partner at Friedman Kaplan Seiler & Adelman in the firm's white-collar practice from 1998 to 2009.

He gained more attention in recent years as the prosecutor in New Jersey's “Bridgegate” scandal, stemming from George Washington Bridge lane closures that were ordered by state officials as retribution for a mayor's decision not to endorse then-Gov. Chris Christie's re-election.

The Bridgegate prosecution, which led to the guilty pleas and convictions of multiple state officials, became an obstacle to Christie's 2016 presidential aspirations and may have also derailed any chance for Christie to serve as Trump's running mate.

Fishman said he will split his time between New York and New Jersey at Arnold & Porter.