It’s not just corporate lawyers who get benched in the middle of a matter.
In fact, it probably happens more frequently on the litigation side and, to be perfectly honest, switching to a different appellate team isn’t too uncommon.
Dropping Cravath at any time, though, is uncommon.
A rare lateral hire got the work, and the surprising re-hire of another lawyer by his firm, after the jump.
In a high-profile securities case, Merck is dropping Cravath’s Evan Chesler for Williams & Connolly’s Kannon Shanmugam (pictured). AmLaw Daily has the background:
Like most Merck matters, the case concerns Vioxx, the painkiller the company pulled in 2004, four years after an initial study showed patients taking the drug suffered more heart problems than those taking a competing painkiller, according to the Legal Times, Bloomberg and the Merck brief in the case, which you can download below.
A flood of product liability lawsuits were filed as early as 2001, after medical journals and the mainstream media reported the Food and Drug Administration had issued a warning letter stating that Merck “had engaged in a promotional campaign for Vioxx that minimizes the potentially serious cardiovascular findings that were observed” in its 2000 study.
But the first securities fraud case against Merck wasn’t filed until Nov. 6, 2003, shortly after Merck released a statement revealing that its earnings would be lower than expected, in part because Vioxx sales were plummeting.
Chesler argued at the district level that investors filed the claim too late. They should have known that Merck might have committed securities fraud–via public misstatements about Vioxx–more than two years before they filed suit, he said.
Unfortunately, Chesler lost on appeal to the Third Circuit, so Merck is pinch hitting his .500 batting average for Shanmugam’s .750 clip at the Supreme Court, where he argued eight times as assistant to the solicitor general.
Shanmugam was at Kirkland & Ellis before going to the SG. When he left for William & Connolly last September he became the firm’s first lateral in 22 years. (That’s a nice streak, but not even half of the 62 years Cravath went without bringing in a lateral.) Shanmugam is a precocious overachiever: among other things, he started at Harvard at 16, was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford and clerked for Scalia.
At least there’s one blemish: he wrote the government brief on Stoneridge.
Williams & Connolly also just brought back David Aufhauser, the former UBS GC – the investment bank Cravath is representing with Wachtell in a settlement that is turning out to be a huge mess.
Aufhauser will be resident in DC for at least a little while longer – as part of his insider-trading settlement he agreed not to practice in New York for two years.
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