Another Former Justice Dept. Official to Join Covington

Two blocks separate Covington & Burling’s offices in Washington from the Justice Department’s headquarters. Covington’s roster of lawyers shows a closer link.

Covington, the firm where Eric H. Holder Jr. practiced law before becoming attorney general, will announce on Tuesday that Mythili Raman is the latest former senior Justice Department official to join its ranks. Ms. Raman, who will be a partner in Covington’s white-collar crime and litigation practices, led the Justice Department’s criminal division until last month.

After departing the criminal division, where she oversaw investigations into some of the world’s biggest banks, Ms. Raman followed a well-trod path to Covington. She is the fourth recent criminal division prosecutor to join Covington and the fifth senior official under Mr. Holder to do so. Lanny Breuer, her predecessor as chief of the criminal division, is now Covington’s vice chairman.

“Reuniting with my former Justice Department colleagues was one of the biggest draws of Covington,” Ms. Raman, who is 44, said in an interview. “It was an easy choice.”

Some of the employee overlap was anticipated. Ms. Raman’s colleagues â€" Mr. Breuer, Daniel Suleiman, Steven E. Fagell and James M. Garland â€" have bounced between the Justice Department and Covington throughout their careers.

But Ms. Raman is new to Covington, underscoring the firm’s appeal to prosecutors departing the Justice Department’s Washington offices, known as Main Justice. And while it is not the largest firm â€" its gross revenue ranked 46th of all firms nationally, according an American Lawyer report released on Monday â€" Covington has a huge footprint in Washington and New York and is competing with Wilmer Hale and a handful of other white-shoe firms to lure top legal talent from Mr. Holder’s administration.

Still, the leverage belongs to the job-seeking prosecutors, whose government résumés routinely translate into seven-figure paydays. When a top prosecutor spins through the revolving door, the biggest firms are there to greet them.

That was not always the case; some big law firms once scoffed at criminal defense work as too messy for their white-shoe sensibilities. But many firms, flush with business from banks and corporations caught in one legal problem after another, are now clamoring for the former prosecutors to handle such specialized work and navigate an overlapping maze of government agencies.

“Increased scrutiny by multiple federal agencies clearly has become more and more of a challenge for our clients,” said Timothy C. Hester, chairman of Covington’s management committee. “For Mythili, it’s not about who she knows; it’s about what she understands.”

Ms. Raman is one of several big names to recently switch sides. Over the last year, the top enforcement officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission landed lucrative law firm partnerships.

Robert Khuzami, the former head of enforcement at the S.E.C., is receiving more than $5 million a year at Kirkland & Ellis, while David Meister, the onetime C.F.T.C. official, is earning a few million dollars annually as head of the white-collar group in Skadden’s New York office. George Canellos, one of Mr. Khuzami’s successors, also recently returned to private practice as a partner and global head of litigation at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy.

During Mr. Holder’s administration, which has already spanned more than five years, Covington was not the only firm to make prominent hirings from Main Justice. David W. Ogden, a deputy attorney general under Mr. Holder, rejoined Wilmer Hale. Thomas J. Perelli, the No. 3 Justice Department official, returned to Jenner & Block. And Charles Duross, the prosecutor who oversaw the Justice Department’s investigations into corporate bribery overseas, recently became a partner at Morrison & Foerster.

All the job-hopping has alarmed some government watchdogs, which complain that the revolving door blurs the line between defense and prosecution. The Justice Department, for example, was criticized for not bringing criminal charges against any Wall Street chief executive in the wake of the financial crisis
Ms. Raman, who cannot contact the criminal division about official business for two years and is banned forever from defending cases she had a role in investigating or supervising, resisted the revolving door for the better part of two decades.

She joined the Justice Department in 1996 as a trial attorney in the criminal division. Although she left for the United States attorney’s office in Maryland, where she ultimately became appellate chief, Ms. Raman returned to the criminal division during the financial crisis, eventually becoming Mr. Breuer’s chief of staff and principal deputy. She worked alongside Mr. Suleiman, Mr. Breuer’s deputy chief of staff.

Ms. Raman, who studied at Yale and the University of Chicago Law School, agreed to take over Mr. Breuer’s role on an acting basis when he left the criminal division last year. It was a busy period.

Ms. Raman continued a crackdown on big banks suspected of manipulating the global interest rate benchmark for credit cards and other loans. UBS, Barclays and others have collectively paid billions of dollars in penalties.

That investigation, focused on the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, led to another manipulation investigation that is expected to yield bigger penalties. The latest investigation â€" which Ms. Raman recently handed over to her successor, David O’Neil â€" is aimed at banks’ potential manipulation of foreign currencies.

Ms. Raman, who has twin nine-year-old children, left before some of her biggest cases could be announced. But now, she said, she “looks forward to watching what the department does, from the outside looking in.”