The case against Google Inc. just got a new face in Washington.
John Ashcroft’s former spokesperson, Mark Corallo, joined fairsearch.org, a coalition of companies that have asked antitrust regulators to examine Google.
In a blog post published Friday, Corallo said he plans to “bring more attention” to the issue of competition in online search, so that the Justice Department, lawmakers, and state investigators “will see the need to increase their scrutiny of Google.”
Corallo brings major firepower to the team — the spin doctor has had a hand in “almost every newsworthy piece of Republican crisis management in Washington over the past decade,” according to Politico.
The new hire comes just as a federal probe into whether Google did break antitrust laws heats up.
The Federal Trade Commission and several states are examining whether the company plays fair in its search results and if it prevented the smartphone makers that use its Android operating system from using competing services, the Wall Street Journal reported.
In an interview, Corallo urged his former colleagues at the Justice Department to also look into the company. “As someone who has worked with the antitrust lawyers there, it is perfectly appropriate for them in their capacity to look at Google and make sure they are following the law,” he said.
Since leaving the government, Corallo formed his own firm, Corallo Comstock, Inc., and has advised companies like Hewlett Packard, Yahoo! and Microsoft, which is part of the fairsearch coalition.
Before serving as a public affairs director at the DOJ, Corallo worked as communications director for the House Committee on Government Reform.
The news of the hire was first reported by Politico.
In that report, Corallo is already on the case. He told Politico the investigation could impact the biggest issue in Washington: jobs. “[I]n an economy like this in which we are struggling to create jobs, we really do need to make sure that certain actors that have incredible dominance are not stifling innovation that leads to more jobs,” he said.
Corallo also told Main Justice he shares his personal philosophy with the group. “I see it as a great fit. I’ve always been known as a law-and-order guy,” he said, “and we should continue to be a rule of law nation.”
A spokeswoman for Google declined comment.
Updated at 2:30 p.m. to include comment from Corallo.
The chief of the Antitrust Division, Christine Varney, is leaving government later this year to join Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP.
“We are delighted to confirm she is going to be joining us on September 6th,” C. Allen Parker, Cravath’s deputy presiding partner told Main Justice.
The move is a surprising one for a New York firm that rarely recruits lateral partners. The last one Cravath brought in was Richard Levin, whom the firm recruited in 2007 to start a bankruptcy practice.
But it is a firm that Varney has had some recent experience with. After Cravath help United and Continental Airlines win approval for their merger last year, she recruited the lead partner handling that review, Katherine B. Forrest, to serve as one of her deputies last October.
Varney joined the Justice Department at the start of the Obama administration with a promise to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement. Among her first acts was to withdraw a controversial Bush era report that outlined a limited view of what conduct would break monopoly laws.
She served for more than two years as the top antitrust enforcer at the DOJ, extracting restrictions on major deals including those that combined Ticketmaster and Live Nation, and Comcast and NBC. In May, Varney’s unit sued to block an H&R Block acquisition, and forced Nasdaq and NYSE to drop a planned merger.
But much of the Division’s work happened under the radar of national headlines, including challenges to deals among poultry processors, and in the dairy industry.
Varney joined the Justice Department from the partnership at Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells), but served in government before that, as a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission and in the Clinton White House.
She will move to New York after leaving the DOJ in August.
Cravath has a sizable antitrust practice built around a stable of blue chip clients, but Varney will likely be limited to counseling companies rather than actively shepherding deals through regulatory scrutiny; ethics rules bar her from representing clients before regulators for a cooling-off period after government service.
Antitrust authorities in the U.S. will sign later this summer an agreement with their counterparts in China to collaborate in reviewing mergers that need to be cleared by both countries, a top Justice Department official said Friday.
The DOJ, the Federal Trade Commission, and three agencies in China will sign on July 27 a memorandum of understanding, Antitrust Division chief Christine Varney said at a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“This is a breakthrough moment for us,” Varney said.
The agreement will allow the agencies to conduct joint reviews, exchange information, and work together on matters in front of regulators in both countries, Varney said.
The memorandum resembles a two-decade agreement in place between U.S. and European antitrust enforcers. That cooperation has been expanding to other countries in the past few years.
The agencies signed a similar agreement with Russia in 2009, and is drafting one with Indian authorities.
“These are our stepping stones to get us further along the line of a universal commitment to procedural fairness, due process, and transparency,” Varney said.
As emerging economies put in place antitrust regimes, the business community has raised concerns that foreign regulators could use competition laws to promote their own trade interests.
“An MOU among competition agencies will not cure this problem, but it is a first step,” Varney said.
In an 18-minute speech at the top business lobby, Varney defended her two-year record at the helm of the Antitrust Division.
“Many of you, either with gleeful anticipation or with horrified anticipation, thought I had a big agenda, and I was going to go around using Section Two to devastate or liberate the American economy,” Varney said, referring to her decision to withdraw a controversial Bush-era report on the section of antitrust law that deals with monopolies as one of her first acts on the job.
“You were wrong,” she said. “I didn’t have an agenda, I don’t have an agenda,” she said.
In the white-collar world, is a bigger firm the better one?
That’s a question Abbe Lowell and Christopher Man said they answered the hard way.
In 2007, they left their long time home at Chadbourne & Parke for a firm that had more than twice the lawyers, McDermott Will & Emery.
Abbe Lowell
“I thought size was the large determinate,” Lowell said in an interview. “More people, more clients, I thought it was a numbers game.”
This month, they reconsidered.
Lowell, a go-to lawyer in the biggest Washington scandals, returned to Chadbourne in early May. On Wednesday, the firm announced that Man and partner Pamela Marple, who represented the John Edwards staffer who tried to take the fall in the love-child scandal, followed.
“It turned out bigger was not better,” Lowell said.
McDermott’s size — 970 lawyers by the latest American Lawyer count — made it difficult to interact with the firm’s partners and clients, he said.
The firm’s partnership structure — tiered with different levels of income and capital partners — also incentivized lawyers to compete with each other for the work, Man said in an interview.
And a bigger firm meant more business conflicts, Lowell said, and having to turn down work because of them.
“Life is always tradeoffs, but am I giving up more work than I’m getting?” Lowell, who helped defend former President Bill Clinton against impeachment charges and represented the likes of Jack Abramoff and Rep. Gary Condit, said.
In a statement, Bobby Burchfield, co-partner-in-charge of McDermott’s Washington, D.C., office said: ”As a matter of policy, McDermott does not discuss its compensation structure with outside parties. Every day, McDermott partners work together across offices and across geographies to provide excellent client service.”
But Lowell and Man said Chadbourne’s size — 398 lawyers according to the American Lawyer — and flatter partnership structure drew them back.
Pamela Marple
Chadbourne also has few lawyers who specialize in white collar criminal defense, and the return of the group doubles the practice at the firm, Lowell said.
Changes in enforcement priorities — especially the Justice Department’s stepped up enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — also made Chadbourne a more attractive platform.
The firm does mostly corporate work, and has a network of small offices in unusual locations that rank low on corruption indices, including Kyiv, Almaty, Warsaw, and Moscow.
Chadbourne does a lot of project finance work in those places, and handles investments that can often run into FCPA concerns.
The firm’s clients previously had to go elsewhere when things went south on those projects, Man said.
Lowell said he has already fielded calls from partners abroad about matters the group might handle.
Their current clients also moved over to the new firm with the group, Man said.
Christopher Man
On the FCPA front, they represent Ousama Naaman, who pleaded guilty last year to corruption charges related to the Oil-for-Food program in Iraq.
Man also previously represented Titan Corp. in foreign bribery concerns that scuttled the company’s deal with Lockheed Martin Corp., and worked on a corruption investigation for energy firm ConocoPhillips.
The other partner, Marple, who worked as a federal prosecutor and on the Hill, as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, has a general litigation practice with a focus on congressional investigations.
The group seems to be doing well at the new firm. Lowell already snagged a major new client — former Sen. John Ensign hired Lowell to defend him in a potential investigation into whether he broke federal laws in the aftermath of an affair with an aide.
Jeffrey A. Neiman, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the landmark tax fraud case against UBS AG, is a serious man.
Jeffrey Neiman
He may have opened the doors to his new private law firm on April 1, but don’t let the date fool you.
“No joke,” Neiman said.
The alumnus of the Criminal Division’s Fraud Section, the Tax Division, and, most recently, the U.S. Attorney’s office in Fort Lauderdale, set up his solo practice, the Law Offices of Jeffrey A. Neiman, with a few big-ticket prosecutions under his belt.
He was one of four Justice Department lawyers who won government awards for their work on the 2009 agreement with UBS, in which the bank paid $780 million to resolve charges that it helped customers evade U.S. taxes through Swiss accounts.
Neiman also served as lead trial counsel on the first offshore tax evasion case that went to trial after the UBS settlement. In that case, the father-son hotel developer pair, Mauricio Cohen Assor and Leon Cohen Levy, were convicted and sentenced in January to 10 years in prison.
While at Main Justice, Neiman helped investigate the $2.8 billion fraud at National Century Financial Enterprises Inc. Former executives at the loan firm were later sentenced to decades in prison.
He also prosecuted Irwin Schiff, the godfather of the tax protesters — a group of individuals who believe they don’t have to pay taxes.
In an interview, Neiman said he is working on building a client base, and plans to specialize in tax – both criminal and civil — and securities regulation matters.
On the tax front, at least, Neiman shouldn’t have a problem drumming up business.
Last week the Justice Department asked a federal court to force HSBC to turn over the names of U.S. customers suspected of using Indian accounts to evade taxes, indicating UBS will likely not be the only bank in trouble for offshore accounts.
“What’s clear from the enforcement action, is this is a problem that goes beyond Switzerland,” Neiman said.
