Arnold & Porter Lands Landgraf to Grow Insurance Practice as Dewey Files for Bankruptcy

"Arnold & Porter has a prominent role in banking regulation law but perhaps more quietly significant insurance clientele for regulatory and transactional work, litigation for insurers like AIG, TIAA-CREF and State Farm," Landgraf says. "The strengths that Arnold & Porter has [in not only banking but in foreign policy] made it really attractive to me and my team."

Landgraf says the synergies brought on by expertise at the firm with banking regulators like the Federal Reserve and insurance modernization efforts would work in the best interest of current and future insurance clients. He has added one deputy so far who is already on the ground, attending insurance-related hearings on the Hill, and is talking to more to come over.

Landgraf also will be supplementing his current insurance portfolio with more firms, he hopes.

With Dewey & LeBoeuf's announced bankruptcy and plans to unwind, the firm's insurance practice will likely be dispersed among the many partners that have already left to go to other firms, with many insurance partners already settled at other firms.

Another Dewey insurance heavyweight, especially in surplus lines, James R. Woods, is now global co-leader of Mayer Brown's insurance practice in New York and had some of the same clients or work projects as Landgraf.

Dewey is, or was, known for captive insurance company strategies and risk transfer for its clients, reinsurance disputes and negotiations, risk-linked securities, merger and acquisitions and other transactions, insurance securitizations, representing insurers in capital markets worldwide, with its far-reaching enormous global insurance law practice, and the Dodd-Frank Act implementation here in Washington. In the fall, Landgraf helped write a report for clients on the modernization of insurance regulation in the United States.

Dewey had also addressed the potential treatment of certain insurance products as swaps under Dodd Frank and a joint regulatory (CFTC and SEC) proposal to exempt the definition of swap for insurance products that satisfy certain tests, including insurance supervision and the "insurance interest" standard. Dewey also heavily touted its insurance insolvency and restructuring expertise and experience.

One of Dewey's top insurance clients on M&A, MetLife, had no comment.

Dewey recently represented l MetLife in its November 2011 agreement to sell select businesses and assets in the Latin American and Caribbean regions to Pan-American Life Insurance Group (PALIG). As part of the transaction, MetLife will sell its American Life and General Insurance Co. unit in Trinidad & Tobago, along with American Life Insurance Company (ALICO) branches in Barbados, Cayman Islands and the majority of the Leeward and Windward Islands, and the ALICO operations in Panama and Costa Rica.