General Litigation Finalist: Sidley Austin

Describe your firm’s approach to litigation and your strategy for building successful teams for trials or other matters. At the heart of Sidley’s “built-to-win” approach to litigation and trials is our emphasis on bringing together dynamic, cross-functional teams from different disciplines, practices and perspectives to craft novel approaches to help our clients achieve victory. Those teams are able to tap into a deep bench of over 100 former government officials from virtually every agency to offer their unique expertise to these matters. From the outset, we pursue an outcome-oriented approach. We don’t approach litigation as a process; we attack it with a strategic approach designed to obtain victory as early and as efficiently as possible.

Discuss the two biggest litigation cases your firm worked on in 2019 and how you reached successful outcomes. Sidley successfully represented AT&T in [the Department of Justice’s] appeal to the [U.S. Court of Appeals for the] D.C. Circuit regarding AT&T’s $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner. It was pivotal to our victory that our appellate team had been very involved at trial, was deeply familiar with the facts, the economics, and the law, and worked seamlessly with the client.