Sharon Nelles, with Sullivan & Cromwell.

Welcome to the October edition of our Litigation Leaders series. This month, we're featuring Sharon Nelles, the managing partner of Sullivan & Cromwell's litigation group and a member of the firm's executive committee. Based in New York, Nelles has a broad practice that includes representing VW in the diesel emissions scandal, Goldman Sachs in Malaysia-related litigation and handling #metoo workplace investigations.

Lit Daily: Tell us a little about yourself—beyond what's in your law firm bio.

Sharon Nelles: Unless you count morning coffee, I am the quintessential person who really needs to get a hobby.  I have not picked up a golf club in 25 years, I don't run marathons—I don't even run late. My kids joke "Uh oh, Mom is bored, she is going to renovate the house." This is not true, but I am someone who does likes to have a big project always going on outside of the office.

Right now I am between projects, which makes my husband extremely nervous, particularly because I have been using my down time to lobby for a puppy. This effort is going nowhere, however. I am involved with several non-profit organizations, and in particular Judges and Lawyers Breast Cancer Alert (if you are not familiar, please check out www.jalbca.org.)  I have more time for this work with both my daughters out of the house.  My eldest, who was 16 months old on the day I started as an associate at S&C, is now working in Los Angeles (and thank you to my LA partners who keep an appropriately distanced eye on her and occasionally toss her some Dodgers tickets). My baby is a senior in college. So you can see there is room for a dog.

 

How big is your litigation department and where are most of your litigators concentrated geographically?

We are 266 lawyers strong, including 54 partners. People are often surprised by the relatively small size of our group. Maybe it's because we tend to have big personalities. We have litigators in offices around the globe. While many of our litigators have a New York home base, we don't really think of our offices as distinct—we all move around quite a bit and operate out of multiple locales and are in pretty much constant contact.  

 

In what three areas of litigation do you have the deepest bench?

We operate differently from most of our peers in that we do not focus on developing specialists. Rather, we train our litigators to be counselors in the broadest sense—multi-disciplinary problem solvers who can service a matter from day one through resolution—regardless of subject matter, regardless of how the matter begins or where it ends. Our lawyers experience tremendous variety in their practices.

On any given day you might be focused on civil litigation in the morning and then working on an enforcement matter or conducting an internal investigation after lunch. Having lawyers who can pivot from one subject matter to the next keeps us nimble and keeps it interesting,  If pushed, however, I would point to our strength in securities, antitrust, and criminal defense and investigations. Virtually all of our lawyers work on all of those kinds of cases. 

 

As head of the department, what are some of your goals or priorities?

Priority number one is to make sure we are providing the absolute best service we can to each of our clients. Our service is our people, so, no surprise, associate development is a center of my attention. There's a lot that we do to that end, including an immersive, interactive leadership academy and a more skills-based trial training set of courses, all led by the partners. We have a brand new state-of-the-art moot courtroom, meaning the first time an S&C associate walks into a courtroom for a client won't be the first time she walks into a courtroom.

Of course there is no substitute for the real thing, and associate development means making sure new lawyers are exposed to cutting-edge work, and that they get to work alongside more experienced lawyers in a true apprenticeship. We give associates responsibility and we do it early and often. I know that for the smart, ambitious students who join us, law is a vocation—they are not here simply for a job. It is my goal that everyone who litigates at S&C has the opportunity to practice law as part of a professional community, much as I experienced it as a young lawyer. 

I look to my partners as culture carriers in this regard. Upholding the values that have made this firm great for almost 150 years, starting with commitment to excellence, matters to us, even in, especially in, the face of a changing legal landscape. We often say ours is a culture of collaboration, with lawyers with different experience and skill sets attacking a problem from multiple directions. Having the benefit of diverse teams necessarily enhances the quality of advice we provide our clients, and thus legal outcomes. You can bet I have my eye on that too from recruiting and staffing, to advancement and beyond.  

 

What do you see as hallmarks of your firm's litigators? What makes you different?

Most of us are homegrown, starting here as a summer associate or maybe after a clerkship. If you are a lateral at any level, you are special. It means not only are we are confident you are going to be a good fit and happy here, but also that you are sort of marrying into the family.

Our lawyers know each other—not just as coworkers, but as people and as friends. We are at the weddings, the baby namings, and the bat mitzvahs. There are book clubs, pick-up basketball games, running teams, vacations together. These are significant relationships that have developed organically over the course of careers. That closeness naturally translates into our ability to work together to achieve results for the clients. There is a built-in trust factor, and a pretty consistent team dynamic.

It's a mindset that extends to our clients too.  We develop deep relationships with our clients—the S&C lawyers who meet with them on day one will be with them every step of the way, and more. We don't swap lawyers in and out to deal with different pieces of the puzzle. We come to truly know and empathize with our clients, understand their needs, and work with them to find the solutions that fit.

 

How many lateral litigation partners have you hired in the last 12 months? What do you look for in lateral hires?

One. We are very strategic in our lateral hires. It's something we undertake only when there is a clear opportunity and reason to complement the strengths of our team. And so welcome to our new partner Sharon Cohen Levin!

I recently learned that Forbes called her "The Babe Ruth of Forfeiture" though she is really a Mickey Mantle switch-hitter (yes, I Googled that). She brings decades of experience at the Department of Justice as well as in private practice in white collar criminal defense, sanctions, and anti-money laundering. And she is someone we have known for a long time and with whom we have regularly co-counseled. We are thrilled she is here.

 

What were some of your firm's biggest in-court wins in the past year?

There are our many and varied successes on behalf of Volkswagen.  Just as examples, the team has secured a string of dismissals on preemption grounds against state attorneys general looking to take a second bite at the emissions matters, landed a precedent-setting win before the Ninth Circuit on plaintiffs fee structures, and knocked out a cartel antitrust complaint.

In another big win, my partner Julie Jordan recently obtained a decision from the Sixth Circuit that extinguished hundreds of millions of dollars of potential liability for our client FCA and clarified important labor law principles. 

My partner Tom White, with of counsel David Tulchin, successfully defend their win for Micro Systems Engineering, where they parachuted into the case just four months before trial.

On the securities front, we have gotten all kinds of complaints dismissed for UBS, BHP, Kohl's, Ally Financial, Barclays, BP, the board of directors for Boeing, underwriters in multiple matters, among many others.  

We also have done some great things on pro bono front, including a major federal court victory affirming the citizenship of the children of same-sex parents born overseas.  

 

Can you give an example or two of tactics that exemplify your firm's approach to litigating cases?

We start from the place that the best results are obtained when lawyers approach cases from a problem-solving perspective, rather than simply employing adversarial tactics. We see a lot of the same opposing counsel and regulators time and again. Many of our cases last for years, and many of the same players end up in multiple cases. Mutual respect for each other and the law goes a long way in being able to effectively advocate for your client. Your words simply hold more weight.

And, again, our culture of collaboration is a driver. We work in teams, we meet as teams, we huddle around tables. And when I say "we," I really mean everyone, from summer associates to the longest-tenured partners, and of course our clients. We exchange ideas and we develop strategies to achieve a win, whatever the "win" is given the client's specific needs. We focus on both legal and business implications, collaborating across practice groups. The cases S&C works on are sophisticated and high profile, we don't just talk to other litigators, but we bring in our financial services colleagues, our corporate governance colleagues, our tax colleagues and so on.

Also key for us is the broad mix of work that our litigators know how to do. It gives us the ability to identify issues as faceted, to anticipate many ways in which the timeline may unfold, and start planning on day one. If you look at our history, we've really been wherever the crisis is–whether the Microsoft antitrust cases, the financial crisis, or diesel emissions matters.  This kind of work is multi-pronged, and our approach lends itself to being able to handle it effectively.

 

Where are you looking to build or expand in the next year?

From a business perspective we are strong, and from a management perspective, I do loose management at most. I am not going to fix what is not broken. What I want to build on is recognition of the depth and breadth of what we do.

Externally, we are sometimes characterized as bank litigators, perhaps because we are very, very good at that, but we are also much more. For example, my partner Adam Paris, with whom I shared a teeny tiny office in Salt Lake City many years ago as part of a Microsoft trial team, is now a first class first chair, including this past year leading a trial for Pabst opposite MillerCoors (a beer brewing brawl with an opening that merited mention in a Jimmy Fallon monologue).

One of our newest partners, Dustin Guzior, will be representing Columbia University in an IP trial against Symantec regarding inventions used to detect malware intrusion in computer systems set for the first half of 2020. Nicole Friedlander has been at the forefront of developing response protocols for Cybersecurity incidents. Kathleen McArthur has pulled more than one declination out of a hat this year in the commodities, futures & derivatives space.  Many of us are advising on or investigating workplace harassment and #metoo matters.

I can–and you know I would–go on given time and space. But let's just say we do a lot of cool stuff around here that you should be and will be hearing about from all of our fantastic litigators.

 

See our past Litigation Leaders profiles:

Covington's John Hall on Plaintiffs-Side Work, Partner Promotions and the 'Plus Factor'

Quinn Emanuel's Diane Doolittle on Show Jumping, Street Smarts and Bet-the-Company Cases

Cleary's David Brodsky on Lockstep Compensation, Latin America and Lateral Hires

Skadden's David Zornow on Top Talent, 'Walking Through Walls for Clients' and Joe Flom's Legacy

Wilmer's Howard Shapiro on 'Classic Trial Lawyering,' Suing the Government and Lateral All-Stars

Morgan Lewis' Gordon Cooney on Crisis Management, Data Analytics and the Importance of Teamwork

Kirkland's Mark Filip on Lateral Hiring, 'Perry Mason' Moments and Training the Next Generation

Cooley's Mike Attanasio on Strategy, Lateral Hires and Training New Trial Lawyers