Mylan’s Legal Chief Gallagher Is Set for Return to WilmerHale

(Bloomberg) -- Daniel Gallagher, who is stepping down as chief legal officer of Mylan NV next week, plans to join WilmerHale as deputy chair of the law firm’s securities practice.

The move will be a homecoming for Gallagher, who was a partner at WilmerHale in Washington before being appointed as a Republican member of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2011. Gallagher, 46, will start in early September, the firm said.

During his four-year tenure as an SEC commissioner, Gallagher was a critic of many of the regulations placed on Wall Street after the financial crisis. He also advocated for overhauling the agency’s stock-trading rules and pushed to make it easier for small companies to raise capital.

After leaving the SEC, Gallagher was president of Patomak Global Partners, a financial services consulting firm. At Mylan, where he was hired in 2017, Gallagher ran a legal department of 200 people and helped the pharmaceutical company respond to a political furor over the high prices it charged for the EpiPen allergic emergency shot.

Gallagher’s “overall experience and background will be invaluable to the firm and its clients,” William McLucas, chair of WilmerHale’s securities department, said in an interview. “There is an enormous amount of enthusiasm about his return.”

The two, McLucas noted, have known each other since the late 1990s, when Gallagher was an SEC summer honors program intern working for McLucas, who ran the agency’s enforcement division.

WilmerHale has handled regulatory and enforcement issues for most of the big Wall Street banks. The firm has been involved in high-profile matters including representing Tesla Inc. in its dispute with the SEC over Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s tweets and JPMorgan Chase & Co. in the London Whale trading debacle.

To contact the reporter on this story: Robert Schmidt in Washington at rschmidt5@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jesse Westbrook at jwestbrook1@bloomberg.net, Gregory Mott

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