Brian G. Cartwright retired from the partnership in December 2005. He returned to the firm and served for two years as a Senior Advisor in 2011 and 2012. At the time of his retirement, Brian was a Senior Advisor at Patomak Global Partners, a financial services consultancy located in New York and Washington, D.C. He was also a member of the board of Directors of HCP, Inc. (NYSE: HCP), a real estate investment trust that invests in real estate serving the healthcare industry. In addition, he served as a trustee of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit legal services organization.
Brian served as General Counsel of the US Securities and Exchange Commission from 2006 to 2009, following a 23-year career at Latham & Watkins. As SEC General Counsel, he was responsible for counseling the Commission on all matters brought before it, including all enforcement actions and all rulemakings. Brian also supervised all cases litigated by the SEC in the United States Courts of Appeals and advised on all adjudications appealed to the Commission. During his service at the SEC, he also served as a senior advisor to the Chairman and other Commissioners and helped shape the Commission’s major policy and regulatory initiatives.
Brian began his legal career in 1980 after earning a JD from Harvard Law School, where he was President of the Harvard Law Review and winner of the Sears Prize. He served as a law clerk to Judge Malcolm R. Wilkey of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and then as a law clerk to Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court. He joined Latham & Watkins as an associate in October 1982 and became a partner in January 1988. He has served as Global Chair of the firm’s Public Company Representation Practice Group and as a member of the firm’s Executive Committee.
Brian was a technical advisor on the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the sequel to the award-winning Wall Street.
Brian's previous career was as an astrophysicist. Following his graduation from Yale University in 1967, he earned a PhD in Physics from the University of Chicago in 1971. From 1973 to 1977 he was a Research Physicist at the Department of Physics and Space Sciences Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley. During this time he published numerous articles in scholarly journals in his field of high energy particle astrophysics.