Terry Mutchler.

A leader in Pennsylvania open records law is taking her practice back into a larger law firm setting after building a firm of her own.

Terry Mutchler joined Philadelphia-based midsize firm Dilworth Paxson as a partner, the firm announced Thursday.

Mutchler created Pennsylvania's Office of Open Records, after she was appointed by former Gov. Ed Rendell in 2008 to serve as its first executive director. After leaving the OOR in 2015, she joined Pepper Hamilton and started a transparency law practice there.

In 2017, she left Pepper and later started a new law firm, Mutchler Lyons, with Charlie Lyons. She also joined Lyons' communications firm Shelly Lyons.

In her latest move, Mutchler is taking the entirety of Mutchler Lyons' legal practice to Dilworth Paxson. Her clients include media companies that need help with records requests and other transparency issues, as well as companies in other industries that do business with the government, and therefore find themselves subject to public records laws. Over the past two years she has represented 47 different clients, she said, including defense contractors, pharmaceutical companies, colleges and universities, and health care providers.

At that point, she said, "you need a bigger platform." Mutchler said other firms were interested in her practice, but she was drawn to Dilworth's platform in particular because of the changes the firm has undergone since Ajay Raju became its CEO in 2014.

"Being able to maximize and really grow this practice out in a significant way is exciting, and I think Dilworth is the place to do it," Mutchler said. While the firm has a long history of political involvement in Philadelphia, she noted, it also hits a "sweet spot between traditional practice of law and also being willing to go in new directions to capture business."

That's important in her practice because transparency law doesn't just involve standard litigation, but also training and other advising for clients related to media, law, politics and government, she said. While media law practices at large firms touch on a wide spectrum of matters, her niche practice is focused on issues related to openness of government records and activities.

"Here, the focus is a very unique subset of First Amendment practice that is a great producer of revenue," Mutchler said.

Before she became a lawyer, Mutchler was an investigative reporter for The Associated Press. She is licensed in both Pennsylvania and Illinois, and has handled client matters in both states.

"First as a journalist, and now as a preeminent authority and legal practitioner, Terry has been a relentless trailblazer in her pursuit of shedding light on the shadowy corners where commerce and the public sector intersect," Raju said in a statement Thursday. "In many ways, Terry's joining Dilworth is more of a spiritual homecoming than a new arrival. The ingenuity, creativity and entrepreneurial drive that have defined her career are precisely the traits that this firm aspires to embody on our best days."

Looking to the future of her practice at Dilworth Paxson, Mutchler said a number of transparency issues are currently bubbling as state, local and federal government entities deal with the new coronavirus. In real time, they must tackle complex questions surrounding an unprecedented challenge—keeping government information accessible and processes open while moving those processes to a remote work setting.

"The key is going to be to make sure the public can participate and the public can know what is happening," she said. "Coronavirus is not a permission slip to block transparency or to keep citizens in the dark."

And in the aftermath, those entities will likely face a different challenge: responding to requests about how they responded to the crisis.

"In the next six months we're going to see and explosion of not only Right-to-Know Law and FOIA requests across the country, but also an equal amount of denials," Mutchler said.

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