John Hemann, Cooley, San Francisco. John Hemann, Cooley, San Francisco. Courtesy photo

In its quest to build out a well-rounded white-collar practice, Cooley has brought on prosecutor John Hemann from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California.

Hemann most recently served as chief of the office's special prosecutions and national security unit and the deputy chief of its criminal division. He joined Cooley's San Francisco office as a partner in the firm's white-collar practice, where he said he will work on the same kinds of matters that he handled as a prosecutor.

He noted that Cooley was specifically seeking a white-collar-focused attorney in San Francisco. "Because of how well the firm is doing and the people who are here, it was just a really good opportunity for me," Hemann said.

Hemann first started working in the U.S. Attorney's Office in 1995 after a year in the litigation department of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, in the firm's Palo Alto office. He then returned to private practice as a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius in San Francisco in 2005. After six years at that firm, Hemann rejoined the U.S. Attorney's Office as part of its national security unit in 2011.

"From going back and forth, I understand how the law firm world works and what is important to clients who are being investigated by the government, or who need advice in the regulatory world," Hemann said. "But then I also think that I've got some really strong perspective from the government side as to how government investigations work, what the government is looking for in an investigation and the best way to respond to or handle an investigation that was launched by the U.S. Attorney's Office or by the Department of Justice."

In his 25-year career, Hemann tried more than 30 cases. He investigated and prosecuted white-collar, cyber, national security and intellectual property crimes.

Those included cases involving foreign counterintelligence. For instance, he was on the prosecution team whose work ultimately led to charges against two Russian intelligence officers and a pair of state-sponsored hackers for computer hacking, economic espionage and other criminal offenses in connection with a conspiracy that began in January 2014 to access Yahoo's user accounts.

"We expect [there] will be an increasing number of white-collar investigations in the Northern District of California over the next several years," said Mike Attanasio, chairman of Cooley's global litigation department. "So, John's focus will be there but [will] also be national, and that was critical for us."

Regarding Hemann's location in particular, Attanasio added, "It is Cooley's backyard, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and we did not have a dedicated, experienced white-collar practitioner in those markets."

Cooley has been growing its white-collar practice in the past couple of years with laterals in Los Angeles, London, Washington, D.C., and now the San Francisco Bay Area.

Just in 2019, the firm added Andrew Goldstein, one of Special Counsel Robert Mueller III's lead prosecutors, as a litigation partner working in Washington, D.C., and New York; Daniel Grooms, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, in Washington, D.C.; former Brown Rudnick white-collar partner Tom Epps in London; and Randall Lee, a former partner-in-charge of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr's Los Angeles office, in Los Angeles.

According to Attanasio, Cooley's white-collar attorneys doubled in number this year. The firm said it has approximately 14 lawyers directly tied to the white-collar group.

"We have been committed to building out a more traditional soup-to-nuts litigation practice [with] everything from complex business litigation to securities litigation to IP litigation, and, of course, white-collar litigation," Attanasio said. "So that's something that we've been really focused on for several years as we've diversified the firm and grown the firm geographically and practice-wise."

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