Deputy UN ambassador leaves to join Boies Schiller, Clooney Foundation
United Nations diplomat David Pressman is leaving his job to join Boies Schiller & Flexner as a partner.
Reuters reported Thursday that Pressman, who has spent the past two years as deputy to U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power, would be leaving his job Friday. According to Reuters, Pressman will join Boies Schiller’s New York office as a litigation partner Monday. In addition to his job at Boies Schiller, Pressman will also be serve as executive director of the new Clooney Foundation for Justice, an initiative established by George and Amal Clooney.
“Ambassador Pressman is an extraordinary lawyer and a formidable advocate,” firm leader David Boies said in a press release. “His counsel has been sought out by some of the most influential people in the world because of his distinguished record of delivering practical and meaningful results, both inside and outside the courtroom. For clients navigating sensitive global disputes, Ambassador Pressman brings invaluable and unique perspective and a proven record of solving very hard problems.”
Ambassador Power praised Pressman for his “strategic counsel, intellectual rigor, and lawyerly powers of persuasion,” noting that he “has spearheaded negotiations [for the United States] on some of the toughest international disputes that exist and has done so with great success.”
During his two years as UN Ambassador for Special Political Affairs, Pressman has represented the U.S. on the UN Security Council. Before moving to the UN, Pressman served as an assistant secretary of Homeland Security and was a member of President Obama’s Atrocities Prevention Board. Previously, Pressman spent time as a civil and human rights litigator in New York City and Chicago.
Pressman said that he was excited about both of his new jobs. “I am thrilled to join a team of enormously talented and innovative global litigators who are outcome-oriented in their approach to resolving clients’ increasingly transnational problems,” Pressman said in the Boies Schiller press release.
Pressman told Reuters that the first project for the Clooney Foundation will be to educate Syrian refugees in Lebanon. “One of the things that both the Clooneys bring to the table is an ability to attract a lot of interested people and attention and resources to issues, individuals and causes the might not otherwise have it,” Pressman told Reuters.
