How Cooley Became A Leading Litigation Firm

Portions of this article originally appeared on Bloomberg Law, part of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033), and are reproduced here with permission. Both the text and the footnotes contain material that didn’t appear in my Bloomberg Law column—a form of bonus content for Original Jurisdiction subscribers.

On June 29 and 30, the U.S. Supreme Court issued opinions in eight of the most high-profile cases of October Term 2025. One firm appeared as merits counsel in four of them: Cooley LLP.1

Founded in the 1920s in Northern California, the birthplace of many leading technology companies, Cooley is best known for handling the initial public offerings of tech giants such as Nvidia, Uber, and quite possibly OpenAI (which has retained Cooley, alongside Wachtell Lipton, for a possible IPO). A Silicon Valley stalwart, Cooley hasn’t historically been known for Supreme Court litigation, a Washington, D.C.-centric practice.

But since Elizabeth Prelogar returned to the firm in August 2025, after serving as solicitor general in the Biden administration, Cooley has hired 14 lawyers into its Supreme Court and appellate practice—including three former high-court clerks straight out of their clerkships. Today, the group has roughly 18 attorneys—and half of them have completed at least one Supreme Court clerkship.

Growing a national litigation practice

The expansion of Cooley’s appellate practice is part of the firm’s push into litigation more broadly. Over the past few years, as many peer firms have focused on transactional practice and deemphasized disputes, Cooley has invested in the space. Since late 2018, the litigation department’s headcount has grown by nearly 40%—and the practice’s revenue has doubled.

Ian Shapiro joined Cooley in 2003, made partner in 2010, and became chair of the litigation department early last year. He told me in an interview that Cooley aspires to be “one of a handful of elite litigation firms—and the premier litigation practice for representing technology, life sciences, and other innovative companies.”

Shapiro dates the start of the firm’s expansion in litigation to late 2018, when the practice was led by Michael Attanasio. Back then, the firm had roughly twice as many litigators on the West Coast compared to the East Coast, so it started growing its litigation practices in New York and D.C. to achieve greater balance.

Around the same time, the tech companies that make up a large portion of Cooley’s client base began facing greater government scrutiny. To help meet these clients’ needs, the firm began growing its white-collar and enforcement defense practice, adding prominent ex-prosecutors such as Andrew Goldstein—former chief of the public corruption unit at the Southern District of New York, former member of Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian election interference, and current head of Cooley’s white-collar defense and investigations group.2

“Over time,” Shapiro explained, “these two imperatives—growing our East Coast litigation practice, and expanding our white-collar capability—evolved into a broader belief that we could emerge as one of the best litigation firms in the country.”

A go-to litigation practice for lawyers and law firms

Cooley’s increased emphasis on litigation has not gone unnoticed—by other attorneys. I’ve been struck by how many lawyers and law firms, sophisticated consumers of legal services, have hired Cooley for their most high-profile, high-stakes matters.

Last fall, after he was indicted on false-statement and obstruction charges, former FBI director James Comey hired Cooley to defend him. The Cooley team—working with Jessica Carmichael, former deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben, and former U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald—won dismissal of the charges last November. (The Trump administration is appealing.)

Following conviction at trial of federal tax and other crimes, former Supreme Court advocate Tom Goldstein added Prelogar to his legal team. She argued some of his post-trial motions (which the judge denied), and she will handle his appeals—to the Fourth Circuit and, perhaps, to the Supreme Court.

Taking on the Trump administration

As a general matter, the nine firms that settled last year with the Trump administration are focused on transactional practice, while the four firms that challenged the executive orders issued against them are more litigation-oriented. And this makes sense. Firms in the first group are under pressure to play well with the federal government to secure the many agency approvals needed for the billion-dollar deals they’re trying to close, while firms in the second group have no problem being adverse to the administration—which they do on behalf of their clients all the time.

The fighting firms hired top-flight litigation practices to represent them—so far, successfully—against the Trump administration. Perkins Coie, WilmerHale, and Susman Godfrey are represented by, respectively, Williams & Connolly, Clement & Murphy, and Munger Tolles & Olson. Williams & Connolly and Clement & Murphy are litigation-only firms, and Munger Tolles is largely a litigation firm.

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So I was struck by the fact that Jenner & Block hired Cooley for its executive-order litigation—and that Cooley took the case. Given the size and scope of its transactional practice, involving deals that require sign-offs from an alphabet soup of federal agencies, Cooley is far more exposed to possible retribution from the Trump administration than Williams & Connolly, Clement & Murphy, or Munger Tolles.

Was Cooley worried about the potential consequences for its corporate practice if it antagonized the Trump administration by representing Jenner?

“We believe a great litigation practice has to be fearless in every kind of case,” Shapiro said. “Sometimes that fearlessness involves standing up to the government or taking a difficult case for an unpopular client. That is a value that my predecessor as chair, Mike Attanasio, emphasized—and one that I have especially come to appreciate during the year and a half that I have been chair.” (Attanasio led the Cooley team that won a permanent injunction for Jenner in district court.)

I asked Shapiro whether it was difficult for Cooley’s litigators to get buy-in from their corporate colleagues before taking on Jenner as a client. He declined to discuss internal deliberations, but he did say this: “The entire firm is very proud of our representation.”

Welcoming a team from Willkie

Cooley’s willingness to take on the Jenner matter had a business benefit for Cooley. It played a key role in the decision of seven litigation partners at Willkie Farr & Gallagher—one of the nine firms that settled with the Trump administration—to bring their thriving practice to Cooley.

“Cooley’s representation of Jenner in its litigation against the executive orders was an important factor in our decision to come here,” said Simona Agnolucci, who along with Benedict Hur led the Willkie group to Cooley. “The issuance of the orders was an existential moment in our profession—one that went to the essence of the oath we take as attorneys and our greater role in society—and I was moved by Cooley’s willingness to represent Jenner.”

Agnolucci and Hur had been co-managing partners of Willkie’s San Francisco office, which they launched in 2019, and Agnolucci also served on Willkie’s executive committee. Along with five other partners, they joined Cooley in June 2025—a move covered not just by legal outlets, but by The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Agnolucci and Hur were eventually followed by more than a dozen associates and several staff professionals, for a total of around 25 people—and by nearly all of their clients.

“When we were thinking about moving, firms were trying to weigh two factors: the cost of standing up and potentially losing business, and the cost of not standing up and potentially losing business,” Agnolucci told me. “At the time, you couldn’t really know how the scales were going to tip at many firms; it wasn’t a knowable factor. But with Cooley, because of its defense of Jenner, we didn’t have to ask what it would do—we already knew the answer.”

A firm with ‘momentum’

Like the litigators from Willkie, Elizabeth Prelogar had many options to choose from. After serving as U.S. solicitor general, she could have gone to any number of firms—especially given the active market for appellate talent.

But after conducting a broad search—which she told me she did “in the interest of due diligence,” and also because she thought she could be picking a firm that might be her “forever home”—Prelogar returned to Cooley, where she had worked for a year before departing to serve as solicitor general.3

“I felt strongly that Cooley matched my values and wasn’t afraid to stand up for the rule of law,” Prelogar said. “The firm demonstrated that through the cases it was willing to take on.”

“What Cooley is building in the litigation space is one of the reasons I decided to come back,” she added. “It’s exciting to be at a firm with this kind of momentum.”

[UPDATE (7/16/2026, 6:03 p.m.): The third paragraph of this story was revised as follows (added text in italics): “But since Elizabeth Prelogar returned to the firm in August 2025, after serving as solicitor general in the Biden administration, Cooley has hired 14 lawyers into its Supreme Court and appellate practice—including three former high-court clerks straight out of their clerkships.”]