Patton Boggs moves to reinvent itself

When Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. joined Patton Boggs, the year was 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and there were — by Boggs’s estimate — fewer than 100 people in Washington who called themselves lobbyists. The firm was a fledgling five-man operation trying to make its mark in lobbying, which at the time was considered an up-and-coming practice area. ¶A lot has changed. Today, Patton Boggs is the most lucrative lobby shop in Washington, and one of the most recognizable brands on K Street. The firm, which turns 50 this year, has about 550 lawyers, including 120 lobbyists. ¶The anniversary offers an opportunity to take stock. The Patton Boggs brand has long been synonymous with its chairman, Boggs. But the lobbying industry is changing. It is bigger, more competitive and more grass roots — evidenced in the Internet campaigns that helped defeat the Stop Online Privacy Act and the Protect IP Act — than it was during Boggs’s heyday, when companies vied to access Congress through a single well-connected lobbyist. As lobbying moves away from the personality-based business it once was, Patton Boggs must map out a future that relies less on the man who defined them. ¶

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a new model for lobbying

In 1962, James Patton Jr., who is now retired, co-founded Barco, Cook and Patton, the precursor to Patton Boggs. He and Boggs, who joined four years later, spotted an opportunity to set their firm apart from others and began building what was then a a nascent model for the influence industry.

At the time, small boutique lobbying firms were the industry standard, and they were mostly led by former heads of federal agencies who became lobbyists after leaving the government. Boggs and Patton envisioned a different kind of lobbying operation — one that was integrated into a major law firm, staffed with attorneys well-versed in the areas of law that lobbyists were looking to change.

“Tom saw the niche no one else saw — of substantive law combined with lobbying,” said the firm’s managing partner Ed Newberry. “So when a Patton Boggs lawyer went to the Hill to talk to the staff director, who was a well-trained lawyer, they were talking to them as a well-trained lawyer, not as a lobbyist who said, ‘Come on, do me a favor.’ ”

The formula served them well. One of the firm’s early successes, the victory that established Patton Boggs as one of the most influential lobby shops in Washington, was when they helped orchestrate the first Chrysler bailout in 1979.

“It was unheard of for the federal government to provide a loan guarantee to a private company,” Boggs said. “It was a very significant win for us.”

Patton Boggs enjoyed unprecedented success during the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s when Washington’s lobbying industry was led by a cult of well-known personalities. Boggs — along with Gerald Cassidy of Cassidy & Associates, Stu Van Scoyoc of Van Scoyoc Associates, Bob Strauss of Akin Gump and J.D. Williams of Williams & Jensen, Mike House of Hogan Lovells — put K Street on the map as the nation’s epicenter of advocacy.