Former US attorney McGregor Scott joins King & Spalding government investigations team

Former U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott has joined King & Spalding LLP, the firm announced Thursday.

Scott will be a partner on the firm’s special matters and government investigations team. Amy S. Hitchcock, who was an assistant U.S. attorney in the special prosecutions unit, will join the firm as counsel.

Scott said in a phone interview Thursday his role will be to help expand the governmental investigations practice up and down the West Coast. He will be based in Sacramento but will spend time in the firm’s San Francisco, Los Angeles and Palo Alto offices.

Scott was twice the top prosecutor in the U.S. Eastern District of California, from 2003 to 2009 under President George W. Bush and from 2017 to 2021 under President Donald Trump. While the Trump administration rarely saw eye-to-eye with California’s Democratic U.S. senators, both Dianne Feinstein and Senator Kamala D. Harris supported Scott’s nomination.

“The bipartisan support I received when nominated to be the United State Attorney the second time around is something of which I am immensely proud,” Scott told The Daily Journal. “I think it’s to do in large measure to the fact that I always viewed the United States Attorney as a non-partisan one.”

Scott thanked both senators at a Feb. 10 news conference when he announced he would step down effective Feb. 28, shortly after new President Joe Biden called on all of Trump’s U.S. Attorneys to resign, as is normal when a new administration comes in.

Phillip A. Talbert, the first assistant U.S. attorney in the office, has been serving as acting U.S. attorney pending a permanent successor being named.

Scott received his law degree at UC Hastings College of the Law, began his career as a prosecutor in Contra Costa County and was Shasta County district attorney from 1997 to 2003. Scott was a partner with Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP from 2009 to 2017, where he won a $52.8 million verdict in a trade secrets case involving two rail companies. Patriot Rail Corp. v. Sierra Railroad Company, 2:09-cv-00009-TLN-AC (E.D. Cal., filed Dec. 31, 2008). In 2008, he retired from the U.S. Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel.

During his second stint as U.S. attorney, Scott prioritized prosecuting fentanyl cases. The powerful synthetic opioid, often imported through criminal networks in China and Mexico, has been linked to a steep rise of overdose deaths around the country.

“I was asked many times what’s different from the first time,” Scott said. “One of my answers was fentanyl. This was just not part of the world we were dealing with in my first stretch as U.S. attorney.”