After a year helping the U.S. Senate investigate Russia's involvement in the 2016 presidential election, the head of Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr's cybersecurity and data privacy practice is back.

April Doss is resuming her responsibilities as chair of the practice, effective Tuesday, as a partner in Saul Ewing's Baltimore and Washington, D.C., offices. Exactly a year ago, she left the firm to serve as special counsel for the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee. She had become a partner at Saul Ewing just a year before that.

While the investigation is ongoing, she said she determined it was time to return to Saul Ewing and continue pursuing her goals for the cybersecurity and data privacy practice there. She said she had always intended to serve the committee for a limited time.

“My departure has nothing to do with the timing or productivity of the investigation,” Doss said in an interview Tuesday. “The challenge of countering malign influence in the Democratic process, that's going to be a marathon.”

Doss said her year's work on the probe gave her an in-depth knowledge of emerging cybersecurity threats, including threats that could affect clients. That includes the manipulation of social media platforms, she noted.

“We've seen that even nation-states are out there posing a risk to private companies and organizations and individuals,” she said.

In resuming her leadership of Saul Ewing's practice, Doss said she hopes to help clients understand the legal and technological risks they face with respect to customer data and employee data, and how they can mitigate that risk. Often clients are intimidated when they see breaches at multinational corporations, she said, thinking they lack the resources of a large business to protect against similar attacks.

“There's been an absolutely growing demand signal for these kinds of services, and I don't see that slowing down because the threat environment is becoming more complex,” Doss said. “Law firms do have a responsibility to become more technically fluent … because any lawyer who wants to provide effective legal advice on cybersecurity needs to understand not just the laws that apply, but all the technologies.”

Doss noted that since she left Saul Ewing, the firm has grown significantly, adding about 150 lawyers through a merger with Chicago-based Arnstein & Lehr. That also gave the firm a physical presence in Florida and Chicago, which Doss said is helpful to her national practice.

The Senate engagement was not Doss' first time working with the government. Before joining Saul Ewing in 2016, she was the associate general counsel for intelligence law at the National Security Agency.

Dechert also added a partner from the federal government to its Washington, D.C., office Tuesday. Michael McGinley had been in the White House Counsel's Office, where he was  associate counsel and special assistant to the president. At Dechert, he will work on appellate matters and complex commercial litigation.