By DOUGLAS S. MALAN
Connecticut Law Tribune
Former Connecticut U.S. Attorney Kevin J. O’Connor kept his family in mind even as his career took him from his native Connecticut to government posts in Washington, D.C.
For nearly two years, as he held high-ranking posts in the U.S. Department of Justice, he committed to a weekly commute from his West Hartford home to Washington rather than uproot his wife, Kathleen, and their four young children.
Now, as a new administration takes over in Washington, O’Connor is returning to private practice with the Hartford office of Texas-based Bracewell & Giuliani, and his decision largely hinged on the quality of life his family enjoys in West Hartford.
O’Connor, a 41-year-old Republican, had been serving as associate U.S. attorney general, but that position ended when the administration of President George W. Bush left office last Tuesday. O’Connor will join Bracewell & Giuliani on Feb. 2.
His practice will focus on multi-jurisdictional commercial litigation, including matters related to corporate restructuring, along with white-collar defense cases. Bracewell & Giuliani is a 450-lawyer firm with offices in the United States, Dubai, Kazakhstan and London, and includes New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani as its name partner.
Attorney Evan D. Flaschen, who heads the Hartford office, which has about a dozen attorneys, said O’Connor will add cachet to the firm because of his considerable network of professional contacts. “He knows everyone in the community and will be out there renewing acquaintances,” Flaschen said.
Alex V. Hernandez, chair of Pullman & Comley’s white-collar defense and investigations section, was an assistant U.S. attorney under O’Connor. “Adding someone like Kevin is going to raise that firm’s presence and exposure in the state of Connecticut,” Hernandez said.
After several months of discussions, O’Connor formally accepted the Bracewell & Giuliani job in late December. O’Connor said he had been familiar with the firm ever since it opened its Connecticut office in March 2007 because of long-standing friendships he has with people connected to the firm.
“Bracewell & Giuliani has a significant Washington, D.C. presence, which I thought would be helpful for me,” O’Connor said from Florida, where he was vacationing with his family last week. “They have an international footprint and a large national footprint. At this point in my career, Bracewell & Giuliani was a better fit, but it was a very difficult decision.”
Many Suitors
Several law firms had asked O’Connor to contact them when he was ready to go back into private practice. He said he had promised his wife, Kathleen, that he would leave Washington regardless of who won the election.
O’Connor said he began considering about a dozen law firms and ultimately narrowed his list to about five. He was looking at New York-based firms, Connecticut-based firms and national firms with Hartford offices whose practices included large white-collar and complex litigation practices.
“It became clear to me at some point that we were going to eliminate New York-based firms,” said O’Connor, who didn’t want to move his family to Fairfield County. “We wanted to stay in West Hartford, and I wanted to work in Hartford.”
Interest was so strong that some firms offered to open a Hartford office for him, O’Connor said, but he was more interested in joining an established practice than creating one. He also said that the idea of returning to a previous employer, Day Pitney, was “absolutely” a consideration. But in the end, he chose Bracewell & Giuliani for its overall size, range of practice areas and compensation offer.
O’Connor’s extensive regulatory and trial experience, as well as his knowledge of corporate and capital markets, made him an attractive addition, Flaschen said. “He has litigated from all sides of the table,” Flaschen noted. “He’s not a one-trick pony.”
O’Connor graduated from the University of Connecticut School of Law in 1992, and early jobs included positions as staff attorney and senior counsel in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement in Washington, D.C. He later served as a partner in Day, Berry & Howard’s Hartford office.
O’Connor served as U.S. Attorney from 2002 until last spring when the U.S. Senate confirmed his appointment as associate attorney general, which is the number three position at the Justice Department. Before that, O’Connor served for several months in 2007 as chief of staff to then-U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.
“Bracewell & Giuliani is very fortunate to have Kevin,” said Day Pitney partner Stanley A. Twardy Jr., another former U.S. Attorney who hired O’Connor to work at the firm in the late 1990s. “He has distinguished himself every step of the way. He has an intimate knowledge of the government and how it works.”
In a prepared statement, Rudy Giuliani praised O’Connors’ “dedication to public service and his extraordinary accomplishments.” Giuliani also noted that he, too, had served as associate attorney general, under President Ronald Reagan.
“I am well aware of the challenges Kevin has faced in the same position, and I am extremely pleased that he brings that experience with him to Bracewell,” Giuliani stated.
Crisis Management
During the months that O’Connor served as chief of staff to Gonzales as well as U.S. Attorney for Connecticut, he regularly logged 15-hour days that began at 6 a.m. “The AG was an early riser,” O’Connor said.
Justice Department work ended around 7 p.m., and then O’Connor switched gears and handled U.S. Attorney duties for another few hours. While O’Connor praised assistant U.S. attorneys John Durham and Nora Dannehy for taking on added responsibilities, there were certain duties that only O’Connor could fulfill per federal regulations.
O’Connor was known to carry two BlackBerrys and two cell phones for his dual roles.
“It was not an easy time professionally or personally,” he said. “But I felt an obligation to be as involved as I could.”
During O’Connor’s tenure as chief of staff, Gonzales’s office came under pointed scrutiny and investigation for his antiterrorism policies and his removal of of nine U.S. attorneys for political differences. O’Connor was the point man for the congressional investigations, and he proved his value, said Hernandez, the former assistant U.S. attorney who now practices at Pullman & Comley.
“His tour of duty with the Department of Justice is a testament to who Kevin O’Connor is and what he’s all about,” Hernandez said. “A lot of people would’ve run from that mess, but Kevin stepped right into the middle of it and took charge of the situation. The work he did was important to beginning to restore the reputation of the DOJ.”
Dealing with that pressure provided O’Connor with insight into how his future corporate clients might react to governmental probes.
“I learned about crisis management in ways you couldn’t in law school,” O’Connor said. “That experience put me in a unique position to understand the challenges faced by any large organization that is under intense government investigation.”
O’Connor and others suspect that will happen more frequently as federal agencies crack down on alleged white-collar criminal activity. That’s especially true for the SEC, O’Connor said, which has been criticized for not discovering financier Bernard Madoff’s infamous Ponzi scheme and other problems that led to the Wall Street crisis.
“When you go through this type of economic turmoil, one of the consequences is a demand for greater regulation,” O’Connor said. “I would expect when the new SEC commissioner (Mary Schapiro) is sworn in, she will really ramp up activities.”
Working close to home not only affords O’Connor more time with his family, but also gives rise to questions about his future involvement in politics.
“The bottom line is one of the benefits of staying in Connecticut is I’m able to have some time to devote to community service,” said O’Connor, who ran an unsuccessful race for the House of Representatives in 1998. “In the long term, whether community service involves politics, only time will tell. Right now, all of my time is devoted to my practice. I want to litigate and get back into court.”•
