(L-to-R) Thomas Poulin, Scott Simmer, and Andrew Miller.

Dallas plaintiffs firm Baron & Budd has opened a new office in Washington, D.C., with Simmer Law Group founder Scott Simmer and two other lawyers from his firm.

The three Washington, D.C.-based lawyers bring expertise in such areas as antitrust, fraud claims, qui tam and third-party payer litigation to 60-lawyer Baron & Budd. The move to a larger firm will enable them to expand their practices, they said.

Simmer joined Baron & Budd as a partner and Andrew Miller and Thomas Poulin joined as attorneys. The lawyers represent False Claims Act whistleblowers along with IRS and Securities and Exchange Commission whistleblowers, and private health insurance plans in recovery actions under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and state consumer fraud/deceptive trade practices laws.

Simmer, who becomes managing partner of Baron & Budd's Washington, D.C., office, said he's known Russell Budd and other lawyers from Baron & Budd for years because they have worked together on litigation.

Budd, president and managing partner of Baron & Budd, said his firm does a variety of plaintiff work, but it wanted to add the specific expertise that Simmer's group brings to the firm. He said the addition will give Baron & Budd more opportunity to work with large U.S. plaintiffs firms such as Motley Rice; Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro; Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd; and Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, among others.

“Really, to be in that club, you need to have the skill set that Scott [Simmer] has,” Budd said, noting that his firm has for years done pharmaceutical, employment class action, wage-and-hour, consumer class action and multidistrict litigation, and asbestos litigation.

Simmer has worked at various firms over the years. Beginning in 2002, he was a partner at litigation firm Robins Kaplan in Washington, D.C., but the firm closed its D.C. office in 2007. Simmer spent a year flying back and forth between Washington and Minneapolis, but that proved difficult so he moved his practice to Blank Rome in D.C. in 2008.

“I was able to grow my practice substantially, but that growth was part of the problem,” Simmer said, explaining that he was running into increasing conflict issues at Blank Rome as the firm grew.

So Simmer left Blank Rome to launch Simmer Law Group in 2014. He and the others making the move to Baron & Budd will continue to work out of their Washington, D.C., office in The Watergate.

Baron & Budd's other offices are in Texas, Louisiana and California.