Continuing their longstanding practice of nabbing Federal talent back into the private sector, Boies, Schiller & Flexner picked up a former association counsel to President Barack Obama to their litigation department. Michael Gottlieb worked as a white House lawyer in 2009 and between May 2011 and March 2013.
At the White House, Gottlieb worked on Supreme Court and appellate nominations, security matters and regulatory issues, including assessing War Power Resolution and cyber security, as the LegalTimes reported.
Grabbing Washington savvy lawyers is a a regular practice for Boies, since they do a lot of “government-facing” litigation. For lawyers that thread in and out between federal and private practice, they gain a sense of the interaction between the two.
Boies successfully brought a review of California’s Proposition 8 to the Supreme Court, and they are moving on to attempt to overturn Virginia’s gay marriage and civil unions ban.
Before arriving in Washington, Gottlieb, acted as assistant U.S. attorney in California’s Central District in 2008 and 2009, focusing on bank and wire fraud, government benefits fraud. He clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens in 2004 and 2005, and after his time spent at the White House, went to Afghanistan for 14 months to work on anticorruption and reform of U.S. detention operations.