Brendan Quigley Brendan Quigley.

Brendan Quigley, a former terrorism and securities prosecutor from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office who won convictions of financial fraudsters and other high-profile defendants, has joined Baker Botts as a partner.

Quigley, who was an associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison before going into government in 2012, joined the firm's white-collar defense and investigations practice in New York on Monday.

The firm doesn't hire former New York federal prosecutors very frequently, but Quigley said it had a good reputation among alumni of the Southern District of New York prosecutor's office.

"I'd resolved a number of cases in 2018 and … early 2019, and it felt like it was time to at least test the waters," he said on his decision to move. "I did, and I was happy to find that Baker Botts was interested and it seemed like a good fit for me."

In his time as a prosecutor, Quigley worked on 12 trials. He prosecuted frauds, including big ones like a $95 million ticket resale fraud scheme and smaller ones like the prosecution of Fei Yan, the husband of a Linklaters lawyer, who made $120,000 trading on merger information that his spouse obtained in the course of her work.

His more recent prosecutions include the case against Arif Naqvi, a top official at the Dubai private equity firm Abraaj who was said by prosecutors to have misappropriated more than $250 million. That case is ongoing.

After a stint in the general crimes unit, Quigley said, he moved to prosecuting terrorism and narcotics cases from July 2014 through January 2017. From that point until he left the government in August 2019, he was part of the securities and commodities fraud task force.

Quigley said no one person in particular at Baker Botts convinced him to join, but he cited the reputations of its lawyers including Andrew Lankler and Lynn Neils, both partners and former prosecutors, and Seth Taube, a partner who was a top official at the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York.

Baker Botts said in its announcement that Quigley's hire bolstered its offering to clients in New York and across the country. Its other DOJ government hires in the last year include Jeffrey Wood, who previously led the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources division, and Peter Huston, the former assistant chief of the San Francisco office's antitrust division.

Quigley's move into the private sector follows the announcement of another move by an SDNY securities prosecutor, Amanda Kramer, who joined Covington & Burling last week. Two other former DOJ attorneys also made moves this week, with Julian Moore, another former SDNY prosecutor, joining Allen & Overy from K2 Intelligence, and S. Starling Marshall, a former trial attorney in the DOJ's tax division, joining Crowell & Moring from Covington.