Ex-Goodwin, Gupta Wessler Attys Start Plaintiff Appeals Firm

Law360 | March 18, 2025

Two Goodwin Procter appellate attorneys, along with a former Gupta Wessler LLP lawyer, have branched out to start their own plaintiff-side appellate boutique, the attorneys announced on Tuesday.

David Zimmer and Edwina Clarke, who helped build Goodwin's Supreme Court and appellate practice, along with Zimmer's longtime friend and appellate lawyer Eric Citron, a veteran of two of the nation's most prominent plaintiff-side appellate boutiques, Gupta Wessler and the now-defunct Goldstein & Russell PC, have launched Zimmer Citron & Clarke LLP.

Zimmer and Clarke told Law360 on Monday that they were looking for "a new adventure," both to have more control over their practice and to pivot to plaintiff-side work.

"We think our knowledge of the defense side will help us on the plaintiff's side," Clarke said. "But to be a little bit more on the side of the little guy was something that was appealing to both of us."

With Citron in D.C. and Clarke and Zimmer in Boston, the three attorneys will work primarily with trial firms to bring their cases on appeal and to answer other kinds of high-level legal questions before the federal courts. The cases will run the gamut, Clarke and Zimmer said, from multidistrict litigation and class actions to patent work and antitrust cases. The three lawyers have also added an associate from Munger Tolles & Olson, Kathleen Foley.

Zimmer said he and his colleagues, who collectively have clerked for 11 members of the federal bench, including four U.S. Supreme Court justices, saw a real opportunity to fill a hole in the market for plaintiff-side appellate work. The goal is for the firm to provide the kind of sophisticated work to plaintiffs lawyers that is more often than not reserved for the defense side.

"We often found when we were stepping into cases that, on the plaintiff's side, it was the trial lawyers who were doing the appeals," Zimmer said. "A lot of those people are phenomenal trial lawyers and some of them are good at appeals, too, but I think that it is really a very different skill set. And so we really saw an opportunity to try to do what we were doing on the defense side, on the plaintiff side, to be a resource for plaintiff trial firms who are looking for help on very specific things, on appeals or important motions."

Running their own firm as they pivot to plaintiffs work was appealing for a couple of reasons, Clarke said. For one, they're able to have a more flexible billing structure, which means they can accommodate a wide variety of clients, offering some a flat fee or even taking some cases on contingency.

The lack of conflicts was also a draw. In addition to her work on appeals, Clarke said at Goodwin she had begun advising investment funds and litigation finance firms, analyzing cases and predicting how a judge might rule on them in their later stages. But this area of practice could be ripe for conflicts in BigLaw.

"That work I would often conflict out of at Goodwin because it was a class action against 100 pharmaceutical companies, half of whom Goodwin has represented or is representing at any given time," she said. "But at our firm, that's the kind of thing we can do."

Also, the three founding partners have all known each other for over a decade and enjoy getting to work together. And although Clarke and Zimmer had been working in and building Goodwin's appellate practice together for 10 years, the BigLaw structure made it harder to collaborate on every case, Clarke said.

"One thing about BigLaw is you can't exactly knock on somebody's door and talk about something," she said. "If the other person's not in the case, they've got their own hours to hit, and you've got your own hours to hit. But we hope that because of our flexible billing and because we're small, we can have all of our minds on the issues that are tricky, which I think is extremely valuable for our client, but also a lot of fun for us."

In this moment in particular, it can be good to be small and independent, especially in the appellate sphere, Zimmer said. BigLaw firms "are under assault right now," he said, as major firms face scrutiny from the federal government challenging their diversity, equity and inclusion employment programs and revoking attorneys' security clearances.

As larger firms in particular are being put under a microscope, having the flexibility a small firm offers can go a long way in the types of cases the firm can take on, both for profit and pro bono.

"I think it's nice to be at a place where we're smaller and more flexible and don't have to be concerned about some of the things that [BigLaw] is concerned about right now," he said. "I think there's a real opportunity right now for smaller firms to really speak out for the legal profession more generally, at a time when it seems like big firms, for whatever reason, aren't doing that."

The trio are launching the firm during an interesting moment for plaintiff-side appellate law, especially at the high court level. Citron's former boss and appellate titan Tom Goldstein, who has since been embroiled in federal tax fraud charges, said when he retired from practice that the odds of winning at the Supreme Court level for individual plaintiffs had become slim to none.

"The little guy, in things that matter at the Supreme Court, is pretty much going to lose," he told Law360 in 2023.

But Clarke said there are still many areas of the law where conservative- and liberal-leaning judges are able to find common ground, especially antitrust litigation.

And Zimmer said that even in the areas of law that might be more controversial, like immigration law — he said he did a lot of work on it pro bono at Goodwin and hopes to continue with it — it's possible to win at the appellate level with the right angle or argument.

"You have to think carefully about how to frame the case and what the case is really about," he said. "So the cases where you're going to bring a broad constitutional claim, maybe you should think carefully about whether that has much of a chance, but if you're making a technical argument about what the statute means and how the agency has misinterpreted and the agency overreached, you can really win these cases."

The three attorneys' ability to think this way and draw from their years of experience going before appellate courts is what makes them valuable to trial firms and the plaintiffs themselves, Zimmer said.

"I don't think it's as simple as a lot of people portray, 'Oh, plaintiffs cases are all dead,'" Zimmer said. "I don't think that's true at all, and I think that's actually part of why it's really important for people to hire appellate lawyers. People who spend a lot of time thinking about, how could you frame a case where judges appointed by different administrations might see eye to eye on certain types of arguments? In a way, it makes it a more interesting time to do this kind of work. And I think we're really excited to dig in."

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