Nathaniel Kritzer, a litigator at Kirkland & Ellis who represented several blue-chip clients in his decade at the firm, has joined Steptoe & Johnson as a partner in New York. He said he was attracted to Steptoe’s strength in cross-border litigation.

Kritzer, who spent more than a decade at Kirkland and made partner there in 2015, started at Steptoe on Monday. He said cases with a cross-border element—whether they be insolvencies, regulatory enforcement matters or transactions issues—are coming up “more and more” and he was impressed with Steptoe’s work in that area, particularly its work enforcing awards against Venezuela and its national oil company.

One of the top factors in his decision to Washington, D.C.-based firm was “the particular strength that Steptoe has in cross-border litigation and matters generally,” he said. “It comes up in a whole bunch of different cases.”

In his time at Kirkland, Kritzer went to bat for several prominent global companies in their bids to fend off lawsuits. He represented Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto in a successful effort to dismiss a securities class action related to its $10 million payment to a friend of Guinea’s president, and he represented directors of the Israeli telecommunications firm Bezeq who won dismissal of a proposed class action earlier this year for lack of personal jurisdiction.

Kritzer doesn’t just do securities class-action defense work. He has worked on consumer fraud cases, litigated bankruptcy cases and defended against employment and personal-injury suits. He also said he currently has one or two confidential matters where he’s representing a plaintiff.