U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. Credit: Mike Scarcella / ALM

In June 2017, Martha Pacold was just months into her tenure as a U.S. Treasury Department lawyer when a White House attorney called about interviewing her for a potential nomination to the federal bench.

Five days later, lawyers from the U.S. Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy and the White House Counsel's Office spoke with Pacold. They would remain in contact for months as she was reviewed by a screening committee—established by Illinois' senators to evaluate the president's picks for judgeships in the state—which eventually recommended her for a nomination to Chicago's federal district court.

Pacold, a former partner at Chicago-based Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott, revealed that initial contact as part of her response to the Senate Judiciary Committee's questionnaire for judicial nominees. Formally nominated on June 11, Pacold also described her past work in the Justice Department during the George W. Bush administration and the most notable cases she handled as a partner at her former law firm.

What follows are highlights and other details from Pacold's disclosures to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

>> Pacold earned $800,000 as a partner at Bartlit Beck in 2016, her last full year at the firm, according to her financial disclosure. In 2017, she made $136,000 before leaving in March to serve as executive secretary at the Treasury Department. She was named deputy general counsel at the department in October. Pacold first joined Bartlit Beck in 2007, making partner in 2010. Her practice focused on contracts, torts and intellectual property. Earlier in public service, Pacold was counsel to then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in 2005-2006. “My role was mainly advisory and involved primarily civil matters,” she said in her questionnaire. She later served for one year as a special assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. Pacold contributed in 2012 to the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, according to Federal Election Commission records. She did not contribute to a presidential campaign in 2016.

>> At the litigation boutique, Pacold represented DuPont in 2010 when more than 500 plaintiffs sued the company, alleging that a closed manufacturing facility in New Jersey had polluted the groundwater. A majority of the cases were resolved during her last seven years at Bartlit Beck, but some were still pending in New Jersey Superior Court when she left in 2017.

Pacold also helped defend DuPont against proposed class actions brought by consumers who had purchased cookware with the company's nonstick coatings. In the multidistrict court litigation, a federal judge denied class certification and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit later denied the plaintiff's attempt to appeal.

Pacold also represented the inventor Jacob Krippelz Sr. in a patent infringement case against Ford Motor Co. In the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. A jury returned a $23 million verdict in Krippelz's favor. The court then found that Ford had willfully infringed on Krippelz's patent and awarded an additional $33 million in enhanced damages and prejudgment interest, for a combined total of $56 million. The ruling was later reversed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

>> Pacold clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas from 2004 to 2005. At the Supreme Court that term, her fellow clerks included Jeffrey Wall, a former top appellate lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell who now serves as the principal deputy U.S. solicitor general, and Henry Whitaker, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Jennifer Hardy, of counsel in the Kirkland & Ellis litigation practice, also clerked for Thomas that term. Pacold is a 2002 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. Pacold held two other clerkships—she clerked for A. Raymond Randolph on the D.C. Circuit from 2002 to 2003, and the next year for Jay Bybee on the Ninth Circuit.

 

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