WilmerHale

WilmerHale

WilmerHale formed from the 2004 merger of Boston's Hale and Dorr and Washington's Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, creating a firm with immediate heft in intellectual property, securities litigation, and government investigations. Founders of the legacy Washington office included Lloyd Cutler, who served as White House Counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton, embedding regulatory fluency into the firm's operating DNA. The Boston lineage contributed decades of trial experience representing technology companies and life-sciences ventures. The firm's strategy centers on crisis litigation and high-stakes regulatory defense for large-cap technology and financial institutions. Core practice areas include securities enforcement, antitrust, intellectual property litigation, appellate and Supreme Court advocacy, and white-collar defense. WilmerHale's client roster is a map of the modern economy's most contested legal battlegrounds: the firm represented Meta Platforms Inc. in the FTC's antitrust challenge, guided Barclays through multiple cross-border regulatory actions, and served as lead counsel for Google in its long-running IP dispute with Oracle, a case decided by the Supreme Court in 2021. Transactional work is secondary — the firm derives its brand from defending technology moats and institutional reputations, not from deal flow. WilmerHale operates over 1,100 attorneys, but the institutional draw comes from a tight cluster of former senior government lawyers. Robert Novick and Susan Murley serve as co-managing partners, running a firm that added Stephanie Avakian, the former Director of the SEC Division of Enforcement, in 2021 and doubled down on Bharara's Office of the SDNY alumni network. Beyond the flagship Washington, DC headquarters at 2100 Pennsylvania Avenue, major offices sit in Boston, New York, and Palo Alto, with regulatory-hardened European shops in London, Berlin, and Brussels. Philanthropic activity runs through the WilmerHale Strategic Philanthropy Program rather than a principal's foundation. WilmerHale's structural differentiator is a manpower pipeline that no peer has replicated at scale: the firm cycles top-tier government lawyers in and out of the partnership at a rate that mimics a regulatory agency's alumni affairs office. The Bharara and Avakian hires are not isolated raids but a deliberate architecture, providing clients with a revolving bench of enforcement-side practitioners now litigating on the defense. When a global bank or tech platform faces a multi-jurisdictional investigation, it retains WilmerHale for the same reason it hired outside counsel during the 2008 financial crisis — the firm's partnership roster is functionally an extension of the regulatory state, deployed commercially.