By Gina Passarella
Of the Legal Staff
Drinker Biddle & Reath has continued the rebuilding of its white-collar criminal defense and corporate investigations team with the addition today of Montgomery McCracken Walker & Rhoads partner Scott A. Coffina.
Coffina, a former assistant U.S. Attorney and a former associate counsel to President George W. Bush, will have offices in the firm’s Philadelphia and Washington locations.
Coffina was an assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania between 1997 and 2001. He then joined Montgomery McCracken before taking a nearly-two-year hiatus from the firm to serve in the White House.
Coffina was hired in May 2007 by White House Counsel Fred Fielding, shortly after Fielding's appointment. With the Democrats having just taken control of Congress in January 2007, Fielding was gearing up for increased oversight demands.
While some of the attorneys had a specific portfolio focused purely on things like ethics or security, Coffina had the political portfolio, which included, in large part, ensuring employees followed rules of the Hatch Act. He became rather busy answering questions about the act as 2008 came around and the election cycle really heated up.
Coffina was also the liaison to the Department of Energy and fielded a lot of questions about drilling and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Advising Bush on judicial selection fell under Coffina's umbrella as well. He was in charge of looking at potential appointees from the D.C. and 11th Circuits.
When President Obama took office, Coffina moved back to Montgomery McCracken. Since that time, he has focused on leading internal investigations and defending major pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers against allegations of improper marketing and False Claims Act violations.
“Over the years, we’ve been building a premier white-collar practice,” Drinker Biddle Chairman Alfred W. Putnam Jr. said in a statement. “Scott is another significant addition. He brings experience in defending clients in high-stakes prosecutions and False Claims Act litigation, and in helping them respond to congressional oversight investigations and similar governmental inquiries.”
Drinker Biddle had to rebuild its white-collar practice after Michael Holston led the bulk of that practice from the firm to Morgan Lewis in 2005. Drinker Biddle has since added more than a handful of partners to the practice, with the most recent addition before Coffina being Ballard Spahr white-collar group chairman Ronald Sarachan.
Another of those additions, Charles S. Leeper in Washington, successfully defended a firm client earlier this year in the so-called “Africa Sting” case, the largest single Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation and prosecution in U.S. Department of Justice history, the firm said.
Gina Passarella is the senior reporter for The Legal. She can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected] or phone at 215-557-2494. Follow her on Twitter at @GPassarellaTLI.
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