Former U.S. Attorney Gross Leaves Snell for Greenberg’s Irvine Office
The Orange County Business Journal
November 2, 2009
By Michael Volpe
GreenbergTraurig LLP has hired former U.S. Attorney Wayne Gross at its Irvine office.
The move is part of the Miami-based firm’s bid to build a team of lawyers specializing in corporate regulation and white collar crimes.
“The white collar and regulatory work has skyrocketed,” Gross said. “It’s a very hot area.”
He previously ran the white collar division at Phoenix-based Snell & Wilmer LLP’s Costa Mesa office.
Corporate securities litigation work at GreenbergTraurig has grown in the past several months, a trend also playing out at other firms in Orange County.
“You know it’s more of the same for me, but with a larger platform that very much supports that,” Gross said.
GreenbergTraurig has about 1,840 lawyers in offices across the world. Snell & Wilmer has about 445.
With 35 lawyers, GreenbergTraurig’s Irvine office ranked No. 22 among the law firms here, according to the Business Journal’s most recent list in January, which ranks firms by local lawyer count.
Snell & Wilmer’s Costa Mesa office ranked No. 6 among law firms here with 71 lawyers.
The local numbers likely have changed in the past year as GreenbergTraurig has added several former government lawyers, including Michael Piazza, a former regional trial counsel for the Los Angeles office of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Piazza moved to GreenbergTraurig in July from Minneapolis-based Dorsey & Whitney LLP’s Irvine office, where he worked on trial, regulatory and technology practices.
“I can’t think of any firm in Orange County who has both an SEC lawyer and U.S. Attorney under one roof,” Piazza said.
Piazza and Gross have known each other for a while. They met when Piazza was at the SEC in Los Angeles and Gross was at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Santa Ana working on several joint cases, Piazza said.
“We’ve since become good friends outside work,” Piazza said.
The move from Snell & Wilmer wasn’t easy, Gross said. The team at Snell & Wilmer’s Costa Mesa office “was like family,” he said.
Gross came to Snell & Wilmer after 17 years as a federal prosecutor, where as head of the U.S. Attorney’s Santa Ana office he oversaw investigations into Broadcom Corp. cofounder Henry Nicholas and the 1990s fertility scandal at the University of California, Irvine.
Gross basically created Snell & Wilmer’s white-collar criminal defense practice, managing partner Bill O’Hare said.
“I can’t say I was looking for a white collar practice before Wayne arrived,” he said. “It’s just Wayne arrived and we had one.”
Snell & Wilmer has several other lawyers outside OC who specialize in white collar work, including Gregory Brower, a former U.S. Attorney for the district of Nevada who works in Las Vegas. It also plans to bring on about eight lawyers in Costa Mesa this year.