Former Senator John Breaux's New Job

[housewolf]

Former Louisiana Senator John Breaux began work this last week at Patton Boggs, after having been courted by countless D.C. law firms. We wondered what’s so attractive about this one and how it ticks. Pape came to the firm in 1980 from the office of then-FDA Commissioner Donald Kennedy, and is in his 8th year as head of the 400-attorney firm.

Bisnow: No firm is better known than Patton Boggs as a lobbying powerhouse. Why is that?
Well, to start with, we have been doing it longer than anybody else. In 1966, when Jim Patton persuaded Tom Boggs to come to the firm from the LBJ White House, what the two of them had in mind was the model of building a public policy practice inside a law firm, which was a new idea. Second, the public policy practice is much more fully integrated in this firm. Corporate lawyers, litigators, you name it, they get involved in the public policy practice, they understand it. I don’t ever hear one of my colleagues say, “Could you explain to me what it is those lobbyists do?” Because they know. On the other hand, when I talk to managing partners at other firms, a lot of them will say to me, “You guys have had a lobbying practice for a long time, can you explain to me what it is you do?” And third, of course, is that we have been blessed to have Tom Boggs as the head of the practice, and he’s as good as it gets.

It’s critical to have marquis players?
That’s the name of the game these days. Every law firm is fighting to avoid doing what we refer to as “commodity work” and get a good share of the “value-added” work, the work that is sufficiently important to the client and where the service you can offer is not viewed by the client as ordinary. If the client thinks that there are fifty law firms that can provide equivalent service, then the client is properly price-sensitive. And if there are situations in which you can do something better, more efficiently, a likelihood of a better result, lower risk to the client, the clients understand that that appropriately produces higher fees.

What was Jim Patton doing before he started the firm?
Practicing international law at Covington & Burling. He started the firm doing international disputes and transactions.

How is Senator Breaux going to spend his time?
A day in the life of John Breaux is going to be a succession of meetings and telephone calls. And then at nighttime, a fair amount of reading because one of the things that makes him so attractive is that he’s smart and he does his homework, so if he’s to go into a meeting about subject “X” he will have read about it. He’s going to be in meetings with clients and prospects, internal meetings either working on solving client’s problems or deciding how to solve their problems, and then working the telephone, because in addition to working with us, the President just appointed him as co-chairman of the tax reform commission.

He could have gone anywhere. Why do you think he picked you?
I think he wanted to go to a place where he would have confidence that we’d know how to put his talents to best use. Where he would have large resources in the areas that he’s most interested in: health care, telecommunications, and energy. And I think obviously the long-standing personal relationship with Tom Boggs gave him a comfort level. For someone who was such an influential and important person in the Senate, it’s nevertheless a little unnerving to leave and then go do something that essentially you’ve never done before. And so here you’re talking about a guy who’s been in the Congress for 32 years. He entered the Congress when he was 28, now he’s 60 and in the private practice of law for the first time, for all practical purposes.

Your two most famous practitioners are now Democrats, Boggs and Breaux. Do you have some Republicans?
Oh, of course. Ben Ginsburg represents the President. We probably have at this point more Republicans in the public policy practice than Democrats. And you know, I don’t actually ask my corporate lawyers what their politics are.

And what do all of them do?
We provide strategic advice to a whole array of different kinds of clients. For example, we have a substantial practice representing cities, and fundamentally what they want is money from the federal government. Jacksonville, Houston, the Dallas-Ft. Worth Airport. We have a sizeable health care-related practice that involves representing healthcare providers, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer. There’s trade representation, where there’s a bill somebody would like passed or amended, or a bill somebody would like NOT to have passed. Some of it is classic-type lobbying work, a lot of it is trying to influence the agenda in Congress or regulatory agencies. We refer to it as the public policy practice because lobbying tends to suggest that it’s a Congress-directed practice, and what we think of is all of the different places in Washington where public policy is determined, and the practice embraces efforts to influence all of those different places. So it can be everything from the Congress, a committee of the Congress, the White House, an Executive Branch agency, you name it.

What do you think people don’t know about Patton-Boggs that would surprise them?
The consequence of having such a well-known brand in public policy means I think, almost unavoidably, that lots of other very fine and very successful practices are not as well-known as they ought to be, simply because they live in the shadow of the public policy brand. They’re not secondary or incidental practices, they’re quite substantial practices. For example, we have a very fine intellectual property practice, and particular strengths in that related to life sciences. We have a very substantial litigation practice in addition to business.

How was Senator Breaux’s initial week on the job?
Great, but on the first day, we were all waiting upstairs for him, wondering where the heck he was. It turned out he was down in the lobby because he didn't have an elevator fob. :)