Goodwin Alums Launch Firm Focused on Plaintiffs-Side Appellate Work
Law.com | March 19, 2025
Two former Goodwin Procter partners and an experienced Washington, D.C., appellate lawyer have opened a boutique law firm—Zimmer, Citron & Clarke—that aims to fill a niche: representing plaintiffs in high-stakes appeals.
David Zimmer said the boutique looks to build off the success of Gupta Wessler, the firm founded in 2012 by public interest litigator Deepak Gupta that has racked up victories at the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of consumers and workers.
Starting the boutique firm are Zimmer and Edwina Clarke, both of whom worked in Goodwin’s Supreme Court and appellate practice, and Eric Citron, who worked on plaintiffs-side appeals at Gupta Wessler and later at Goldstein & Russell.
“Edwina and I, being on more the defense side, really started to recognize how many cases there were where you'd have the bigger companies [represented by] former Supreme Court clerks [and] people who've been in the solicitor general's office," said Zimmer, also a lecturer at Harvard Law School.
"Then on the other side, it was often the people who had done the trial, who are often phenomenal fire trial lawyers but don't necessarily have as much experience or sometimes that much interest in doing appellate work,” Zimmer added. "We had been thinking about whether there’s an opportunity to be a resource for plaintiffs trial firms to serve the role that the appellate practices at Big Law firms serve on the defense side."
The three have clerked for 11 federal judges, including Zimmer for Justice Elena Kagan; Clarke for Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter; and Citron for Kagan and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Clarke said the trio plans to partner with plaintiffs-side trial firms and leverage their skills to approach cases with fresh eyes and suss out new framing at the appellate level.
“The framing that you use in trial to appeal to jurors or to the district court often will be quite different than the framing that might appeal to the court of appeals," said Clarke. "So having those fresh eyes to rethink that framing … and people who are used to doing that—and thinking about how a panel of judges will react to a particular framing—it's very useful and valuable.”
Clarke acknowledged it's hard to leave Big Law—where there are high hourly rates and clients with deep pockets—for a plaintiffs-side appellate firm with a different business model.
But she said Gupta Wessler's Matthew Wessler helped reassure them not to worry about finding clients—-that Gupta Wessler too had that concern in 2012 but learned there's a need for the type of work they're doing.
The boutique said it will likely take on appeals on a "contingency fee" or some hybrid form of payment.
“I think it’s exciting. One of the reasons we're doing this is that there are people who might like to hire us, but can't pay the Big Law rate or need a more flexible arrangement,” Clarke said.
“I think one thing we'll have to figure out right is how to have a mix of work," Clarke added. "Our goal is to have a very flexible fee structure where we’ll take some hourly, we’ll take some flat fee, we’ll take some contingency work, [or] we’ll take some mix.”
They have also hired one associate, Kathleen Foley, who previously worked at Munger, Tolles & Olson.
Among those the firm is representing so far are dairy farmers suing the government over its alleged use of firefighting foam containing "forever chemicals" at the Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico, which allegedly contaminated their farms. In February, U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel of the District of South Carolina declined to dismiss the case and ruled the government doesn't have sovereign immunity from the Federal Tort Claims Act allegations.
The boutique has also partnered with trial firm Napoli Shkolnik in representing New York local governments suing the consulting firm McKinsey for its alleged role in the opioid crisis and helped put together an opposition to McKinsey’s motion to dismiss filed this month. There, local governments argue their claims aren’t foreclosed by a consent judgment between McKinsey and New York's attorney general in a separate lawsuit.
Zimmer said the trio's early career experience vetting certiorari petitions and later practicing before appellate panels means they know how to grab a judge’s attention in the brief-writing process.
“Just because [a federal appeals panel] hear[s] the case doesn't mean that they're going to take it particularly seriously,” Zimmer said. “Experience clerking in the courts of appeals, but also practicing before them a lot, is really valuable in thinking about ‘OK, what's the structure and framing that's going to jump out to clerks and judges?’”
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