WilmerHale recently announced that Molly Boast, former Department of Justice Deputy Assistant Attorney General, joined the firm’s New York office as a partner in the Antitrust and Competition Practice.
Boast possesses over thirty years of litigation experience in both the public and private sectors. This includes leadership roles in the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and in private practice.
As a key member of the firm’s New York office and its global Antitrust and Competition Practice, she will manage high-profile antitrust regulatory and litigation matters for the firm.
From May 2009 to February 2011, she served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. As the senior official responsible for civil enforcement, she oversaw all merger and conduct investigations; this led numerous significant merger and civil non-merger resolutions, including the NBC/Comcast and Oracle/Sun Microsystems ventures. 150 legal professionals were under her supervision in the Antitrust Division; she was one of three division authors of the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines.
Boast served first as Senior Deputy Director and then as Director of the Bureau of Competition at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from 1999-2001. Many mergers occurred during this period of time; she was responsible for many significant competition investigations and enforcement actions and served as the bureau’s Capitol Hill spokesperson on energy and pharmaceutical industry matters.
Michelle Miller and Thomas Mueller, co-chairs of WilmerHale’s Antitrust and Competition Practice, expect Boast “to bring a depth of experience from her years of government service and private practice that will be of tremendous benefit to the firm’s clients.”
William Perlstein, co-managing partner at the firm was quoted as saying in a press release at the firm’s website: “Molly Boast is one of the top antitrust litigators in the field. Her extensive experience at the senior levels of two government agencies and in leading complex litigation matters is a unique combination that will serve not only our antitrust and competition clients, but also our entire firm.”
Boast is well known in the New York litigation community. She served previously as a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, and before that at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae LLP. She has handled major antitrust litigation and governmental investigation matters, including a seminal antitrust case before the US Supreme Court. At Debevoise, Boast was the chair of the antitrust group, and at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, she chaired the litigation department.
Additionally, Boast has served on the governing bodies of the litigation and antitrust sections of the American Bar Association and the New York State Bar Association. She was also the first woman to chair the federal courts committees of both the Federal Bar Council and the New York City Bar Association. She earned her JD from Columbia University School of Law; there she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and received the Jane Marks Murphy Prize for public interest contributions.
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP has twelve offices across the USA, Europe and Asia, with over 1,100 attorneys worldwide.
With one of the leading antitrust and competition practices in the United States and Europe, WilmerHale has decades of experience and over 70 competition lawyers in the US, Europe and China. The practice is consistently ranked in the top tiers of major legal directories such as Chambers USA, Chambers Global, Legal 500, Global Competition Review and PLC Which Lawyer.