Governor names new legal affair secretary

Much of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s senior staff turned over in the closing weeks of the year, with a new legal affairs secretary taking the reins on New Year’s Eve.

Chief Deputy Legal Affairs Secretary Analea J. Patterson took over from Catherine E. Lhamon. Both have been with the Newsom administration since shortly after he took office two years ago. The position pays $207,000 annually and does not require Senate confirmation.

Patterson is a former legislative director for Lieutenant Gov. Gray Davis and served as special assistant for policy and planning for California Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Lockyer said Patterson is “a capable manager” and “a great lawyer.”

“She’s bright, she can manage complicated tasks, she’s loyal,” Lockyer said.

He said that one of her main projects in his office was addressing the backlog of DNA rape kits around the state. In the early 2000s, Lockyer said, authorities were only breaking about one cold case a year using these DNA samples. Under her watch, the situation greatly improved even with thousands more samples coming in every year.

“There were hundreds of thousands of DNA samples in refrigerators that had not been digitized,” Lockyer said.

Patterson went on to spend 14 years as a partner at Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP before joining the Newsom administration. Her clients included Major League Baseball and the National Basketball League.

In a news release, Newsom praised Patterson’s negotiations with Pacific Gas & Electric Co. during its bankruptcy and in the state’s COVID-19 response. The Newsom administration did not make Patterson available for an interview.

The PG&E exited Chapter 11 on July 1. But the pandemic continues and will likely continue to take up a good deal of attention. The job of defending Newsom’s pandemic-related emergency orders in court has fallen to Attorney General Xavier Becerra and his staff.

But Newsom’s own legal staff have played a key role in designing these orders and making sure they stand up to scrutiny. So far, they generally have, aside from one order from a Sutter County judge relating to vote by mail ballots.

Patterson is married to Nathan Barankin, who served as chief of staff to Kamala D. Harris both as attorney general and U.S. Senator. He gave up that job in late 2019 and opened a consultancy in Sacramento rather than follow Harris into the vice president’s office.

“I’m biased, but @GavinNewsom’s appointment of @analeapatterson as Legal Affairs Sec’y is genius,” Barankin tweeted after Newsom announced her appointment. “Ann’s a unicorn: brilliant lawyer, policy wonk, worked in all 3 branches, run statewide campaigns.”

While Patterson and Barankin appear to have gone all in choosing Sacramento over Washington, D.C., the same does not appear to be true for Lhamon. She never gave up her role as the chairwoman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

She is widely rumored to be up for an appointment by President-elect Joe Biden. When Biden was vice president, President Barack Obama appointed her as assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education and later added her role on the Commission for Civil Rights.

Demand Justice, a progressive legal organization, included her as one of about 30 attorneys on its short list for the U.S. Supreme Court each of the last two years. Other Californians on that list include Becerra — who will soon face a confirmation vote in the U.S. Senate to be Biden’s secretary of health and human services — and California Supreme Court Justices Goodwin H. Liu and Leondra R. Kruger.

“She is one of the great civil rights lawyers in this county,” said Mark Rosenbaum, director of Public Counsel Opportunity Under Law, a job Lhamom used to hold. “President-elect Biden could not make a better selection than Catherine Lhamon in any position, whether it’s in the Justice Department or the Department of Education.”

If Becerra is confirmed, Newsom could appoint a new California attorney general. Last month he named Luis A. Cespedes as his new judicial appointments secretary. Cespedes replaced Martin J. Jenkins, now a California Supreme Court justice.