Pete Patterson is a partner at Cooper & Kirk. His practice includes appellate litigation, constitutional litigation, commercial litigation, and administrative law. In addition, Mr. Patterson for a number of years taught an appellate litigation clinic at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. Mr. Patterson has argued in the U.S. Supreme Court and in nearly every regional federal circuit court of appeals.

Mr. Patterson has extensive experience in complex matters involving important questions of constitutional, statutory, and administrative law. He frequently has represented plaintiffs in cases alleging constitutional or statutory violations by federal, state, and local government officials. He also has represented plaintiffs in class action litigation against corporations and the federal government.

Mr. Patterson joined the firm in 2009. Prior to arriving at Cooper & Kirk, he served as a law clerk to Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Mr. Patterson typically works from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Mr. Patterson received his J.D. from Stanford Law School in 2006, earning Order of the Coif honors for finishing in the top 10% of his class. There, he was a member of the Stanford Law Review, serving as an Articles Editor. He also participated in litigation before the United States Supreme Court through the Stanford Supreme Court Litigation Clinic.

Mr. Patterson graduated with University Honors from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000 with a B.S. in Information and Decision Systems. While at Carnegie Mellon, he wrote a regular column for the student newspaper and was a member of the football team.

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Michael Kirk

Partner, Cooper & Kirk, PLLC

Biography

Michael W. Kirk has extensive civil litigation experience representing a wide range of clients on a variety of constitutional, statutory, contractual, commercial and tort matters.

Mr. Kirk has appeared regularly in cases brought against the federal government. Most recently, for example, he successfully represented Ford Motor Company in a lawsuit against the Federal government seeking to recover environmental clean-up expenses arising from a World War II contract to build B-24 Bombers. While the Court of Federal Claims dismissed Ford’s suit, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed, and remanded with instructions that judgment be entered in favor of Ford. He is currently representing Shell Oil Company, Union Oil Company of California, Atlantic Richfield Company, and Chevron-Texaco in a similar lawsuit against the Federal Government arising from World War II contracts. And Mr. Kirk recently served as lead trial counsel for American Capital Corporation in a lawsuit against the United States for breach of contract arising from an agreement entered by the Government in an effort to address the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s. Following trial, the Court of Federal Claims awarded plaintiffs $109 million in January 2005.

Mr. Kirk has also represented state and local governments in numerous complex constitutional and statutory cases involving such varied issues as Medicaid, school desegregation, and prison reform. Most recently, he has represented the States of Tennessee and Hawaii in several cases involving their Medicaid programs. He is currently representing the Marion County, Florida School District in its school desegregation case, and he has successfully represented public school districts in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Rockford, Illinois, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in their efforts to obtain unitary status and end long-running school desegregation cases. In the civil rights arena, Mr. Kirk served as lead trial counsel on behalf of a plaintiff in securing the largest verdict ever returned against a suburban Maryland police department.

Mr. Kirk has an extensive appellate practice, and he has argued cases before the United States Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Federal, Third, Seventh, and Ninth Circuits.

Mr. Kirk served as law clerk to Judge James L. Ryan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. He received his J.D. degree, cum laude, in 1988 from Northwestern University. He served as Executive Editor of The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, and is a member of the Order of the Coif. He earned an A.B. degree, cum laude, from Georgetown University in 1985.

Mr. Kirk is a member of the Bars of the State of New York, the District of Columbia, the United States Supreme Court, the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, District of Columbia and Federal Circuits, the United States District Courts for the Districts of Arizona, Maryland and the District of Columbia, and the United States Court of Federal Claims.

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David H. Thompson

Managing Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC

Biography

David Thompson is the Managing Partner of Cooper & Kirk and joined the firm at its founding. Mr. Thompson has extensive trial and appellate experience in a wide range of matters and has secured victories worth billions of dollars. He has successfully challenged numerous laws on Second Amendment grounds. He has also litigated cases in over 30 federal district courts, argued in each of the 13 federal circuit courts of appeal, and argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as many state courts. Mr. Thompson was awarded an A.B. degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in 1991, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1994, Mr. Thompson received a J.D. degree, cum laude, from Harvard Law School.

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Charles J. Cooper

Founding Partner, Cooper & Kirk PLLC

Biography

Charles J. Cooper is a founding member and the chairman of Cooper & Kirk, PLLC, “one of the Nation’s leading litigation boutiques” (Above The Law 2017). The National Law Journal recently wrote that Mr. Cooper’s “brilliant legal career has so far spanned five decades and thrust Cooper into the spotlight in some of the most historic moments of the country’s modern history.” He has argued nine cases before the United States Supreme Court and scores of appeals before each of the 13 federal courts of appeals and several state supreme courts. He has been lead trial counsel in numerous complex, weeks-long trials in federal courts throughout the country. Named by the National Law Journal as one of the 10 best litigators in Washington D.C., Mr. Cooper’s work has been reported in numerous press accounts, and he has been called a “powerhouse attorney” (Fortune 2015), “a hard-nosed litigator” (Washington Post 2017), and “one of the country’s most in-demand civil litigators and a Washington legal institution unto himself” (The American Spectator 2014).

After graduating from the University of Alabama School of Law in 1977, where he ranked first in his class and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Alabama Law Review, Mr. Cooper began his career as a law clerk to Judge Paul Roney on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and to Justice William H. Rehnquist in 1978–79. He then practiced law in Atlanta for two years before joining the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of, among other things, appellate matters. In 1985 President Reagan appointed him to the position of Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, which is the office responsible for providing legal opinions and advice to the White House, the Attorney General, and Executive Branch departments and agencies on issues covering the full spectrum of federal constitutional, statutory, and regulatory law.

In 1988 he returned to private practice as a litigation partner in the Washington, D.C. office of McGuireWoods. From 1990 until the founding of Cooper & Kirk in 1996, he was a partner at Shaw Pittman (now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman), where he headed the firm’s Constitutional and Government Litigation Group.

Mr. Cooper has represented a wide range of public and private clients in highly complex constitutional, civil rights, antitrust, healthcare, banking, intellectual property, elections, campaign finance, administrative, commercial, and government contract cases. He has led trial teams in cases that have won judgments and settlements valued in the billions of dollars and that have established ground-breaking constitutional precedents.

Much of Mr. Cooper’s practice has involved representing high-profile clients in nationally prominent matters, including: the State of Florida in a First Amendment suit brought by the Disney Company concerning its autonomous regulatory authority over its Disney World property; the Commonwealth of Virginia in a suit seeking to enjoin the removal of noncitizens from its voter rolls; 38 members of the Duke Lacrosse team falsely accused of rape by officials of Duke University and the City of Durham; Harper Lee in a copyright dispute with the heirs of Gregory Peck; high-ranking former government officials such as former Attorneys General John Ashcroft, Jeff Sessions, and William Barr, and Ambassador John Bolton; several Governors and United States Senators; over 100 Members of Congress; and many state, territorial, and local government bodies and officials. He has also represented and advised government officials and public figures in connection with sensitive private issues that needed to be, and were, resolved discreetly without becoming matters of public record.

In 1998 Chief Justice Rehnquist appointed Mr. Cooper to the Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Judicial Conference of the United States, where he served for three terms. He also served as a Public Member, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, of the National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal. He is a member of numerous professional associations, including the American Law Institute (since 1993) and the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers (since 1996). He is also an active member of the Federalist Society and the Republican National Lawyers Association, which in 2010 named him Republican Lawyer of the Year and in 2016 honored him with its Edwin Meese III Award.

Mr. Cooper has published scores of articles and spoken extensively on constitutional and legal policy topics. He has appeared before congressional committees on 26 occasions, testifying as an expert on a wide variety of legal issues, including the Chevron doctrine of judicial deference to administrative agencies, the diversity of citizenship jurisdiction of federal courts, statehood bills for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, and the impeachment of President Clinton.

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