Former 9th Circuit Judge Paul Watford joins Wilson Sonsini

Shortly after he and four other Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP litigation partners jumped to Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati PC in November 2021, Fred A. Rowley Jr. made an unusual suggestion to 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Paul J. Watford.

"Why don't you come over and join us?" Rowley asked, Watford recalled Tuesday.

Watford, an appointee of President Barack Obama, was a former Munger colleague before he joined the federal bench in 2012 and remained friends with them. He dismissed the idea.
"I wasn't thinking about that," he said in a phone interview.

But a year later, the 55-year-old judge -- one of the leading Black jurists in the nation who was once mentioned as a possible U.S. Supreme Court nominee -- pondered his future and asked whether he wanted to reunite with his former colleagues instead of spending the rest of his career on the bench.

"They talked about how wonderful the firm is," said Watford, who added that there was a "narrow window" before it would be too late to leave.

He reconsidered and submitted his resignation letter in early January. After his final day on May 31, Watford was at work at Wilson Sonsini's Los Angeles office the next day.

The firm made its announcement on Tuesday. "The addition of someone with Judge Watford's stature is another substantial step forward for our firm's litigation department and our ongoing expansion in Los Angeles," Douglas J. Clark, Wilson Sonsini's managing partner, stated.

Watford said he did not work with a legal recruiter and said the appeal of making more money in private practice was not a factor in his decision. "My wife and I are well off," he said. "There was no need to leave the court for financial reasons."

"I plan to be very much a generalist," he said. "That's what I was at Munger. I do not plan to have a practice that's just focused on appellate litigation. I wanted to make sure I went to a law firm where the culture was a good fit for me."

Watford said he learned a lot as a judge about areas of the law with which he was unfamiliar, including copyright litigation.

Luis Li, a longtime friend who worked with Watford in the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles and at Munger, said many Wilson Sonsini clients are in the most interesting areas of the U.S. economy, from technology or biotechnology to the intersection of artificial intelligence and copyright law.

"Those are the sorts of things that make someone of his intellect interested," Li said in a phone interview. "We have momentum here and it's exciting."

Watford's departure last week has left a vacancy on the 9th Circuit and he is the fifth Obama appointee to leave the federal bench to join large law firms within the past year. That's part of the hazard for presidents in appointing younger lawyers to the bench, a bipartisan trend, in the hopes that they will be around for decades. Some of them decide they want to do other things.
Biden nominated U.S. District Judge Ana I. De Alba of Fresno to replace Watford, and she is scheduled for a vote Thursday on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Legal recruiter Larry Watanabe said Watford is "a natural fit as far as skill set" for Wilson Sonsini. "It's a great add."