Anna-Rose Mathieson, a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, left O’Melveny & Myers this month for California Appellate Law Group, a six-lawyer boutique in San Francisco. She spoke with The Recorder about making the leap to Small Law.
Why would you move your practice to a small boutique? Particularly for appellate work, a boutique makes tons of sense. Appellate cases are on a smaller scale than the kind of sprawling trial cases where you need, in many cases, teams of people to review the documents depending on how broad the range of discovery. For an appeal, having one or two people really intensely focusing on the case makes it so you have a coherent, well-thought-out appeal from the beginning. … The California Appellate Law Group has six attorneys, all of whom are appellate specialists, each of whom has between nine and 40 years of appellate experience. And so we can put together a team for any appeal of two or three people who have experience in that courtroom, who have experience in that kind of appeal, and all of whom are able to bring their own experience onto it. … Here I’ll be able to jump in and do every aspect of the appeal, and focus the shape of the argument. And so, instead of having a situation where you can’t have a partner who’s been doing this for 20 years at a Big Law firm with their rates doing the initial research, sitting there on Westlaw, clicking away for all the cases. At our firm, with our rates, you can and actually end up having it be cheaper than it can be at a big firm. For that set of appeals we’re targeting, it makes a ton of sense for the clients. We can essentially have an appellate expert who might have a decade or more of experience doing everything from scratch.
