Four "Rising Stars" Profiled in Diverse Areas of Practice

Law360 has named four Latham & Watkins lawyers among its 2015 “Rising Stars” in coverage that recognizes attorneys under the age of 40 “whose legal accomplishments belie their age...selected based on their career accomplishments in their respective practice areas,” according to the legal news service. Corporate counsel Ryan deFord in New York, finance partner Natasha Gianvecchio in Washington, D.C., and litigation partners Melissa Arbus Sherry in Washington, D.C. and Brendan McShane in San Francisco were selected from among more than 1,200 nominations reviewed by Law360 editors.

deFord, a counsel in the firm’s Capital Markets and Private Equity Finance Practice Groups, was honored in the Retail & E-Commerce category, largely based on his “key role in the highly anticipated initial public offering of New York-based Shake Shack Inc., guiding the burger shop to an opening that saw shares more than double in its first day of trading.”  Law360 also noted that deFord “showed off his transactional acumen” by advising on more than 20 diverse corporate deals during the past year.

Gianvecchio, a partner in the firm’s Energy Regulatory & Markets Practice, was named an Energy rising star for representing “some of the country’s biggest energy companies in billions of dollars’ worth of transactions and in precedent-setting Federal Energy Regulatory Commission proceedings.” She was noted for advising a range of clients in the electric and natural gas industries, including independent power producers, power marketers, electric utilities, natural gas companies and financial institutions.

Sherry, a partner in the firm’s Supreme Court & Appellate Practice, was named in the Appellate category based on her deep appellate experience, which includes personally arguing 10 cases before the US Supreme Court during her five-year tenure as an Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States. Sherry rejoined Latham from the Solicitor General’s Office in October 2014 and “has already been named co-chairwoman of the litigation department at the 280-plus attorney Washington office.”

McShane, a partner in the firm’s Antitrust & Competition Practice, was recognized as a Class Action rising star for “litigating large-scale and multijurisdiction antitrust and unfair competition cases and… defending clients facing consumer class actions.”   For example, McShane was part of a team of Latham litigators who last year defeated certification of two proposed classes of direct and indirect purchasers alleging a bid-rigging and price-fixing conspiracy among suppliers of optical disk drives, and he also secured dismissal of a consolidated case involving more than 40 nationwide proposed class actions alleging that travel companies had entered into a conspiracy among themselves and with major hotel chains to fix the prices of online hotel room reservations.