Legal News

D.C. Heavyweight Trial Lawyer Decamps to Skadden

By Ashby Jones

Crime pays.

Actually, to be more specific: white-collar criminal-defense work pays. At least that’s what the folks over at Skadden Arps are banking on.

In recent months, the firm has pulled in a rash of high-profile criminal-defense lawyers, including Allen Ruby, former U.S. District judge Stephen Robinson, former acting U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Michael Loucks, and former White House counsel Greg Craig.

On Tuesday, the firm will announce another, that it’s hiring high-profile trial lawyer Michele Roberts from Akin Gump.

Roberts has long been a go-to courtroom hire in the nation’s capital. She’s landed on Washingtonian’s list of Washington’s top 75 lawyers and the magazine’s roster of Washington’s 100 Most Powerful Women in 2009. Legal Times named her as one of Washington’s 10 Leading Criminal Defense Lawyers.

She worked with Anita Hill during Justice Clarence Thomas’s 1991 confirmation hearings, won an acquittal for Kenneth Starr’s spokesman Charles Bakaly in 2000, and helped win a bribery acquittal for Washington developer Douglas Jemal.

At the beginning of her legal career, Ms. Roberts spent several years in the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, and became chief of the Trial Division.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 22, 2011 (boomark / email).