Gibson Dunn scoops another US public official

Los Angeles firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher has lured its second public official to the firm in as many weeks, hiring a Los Angeles-based US attorney.

Debra Wong Yang will join Gibson Dunn as a partner in January, leaving her post on the Department of Justice’s corporate fraud task force in November.

She will jointly head Gibson Dunn’s crisis management group with Theodore Olson, a former solicitor general, and Randy Mastro, the deputy to 9/11 mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

Yang’s hire comes a week after that of Maurice Suh, a former deputy mayor of Los Angeles. Suh will work with yet another prominent hire of Gibson Dunn, Robert Bonner, a former federal judge and head of the US customs department. Bonner now heads up the firm’s homeland security practice, which launched 11 months ago.

Yang, Olson and Mastro, meanwhile, will work on internal investigations undertaken by companies caught up in the stock-options backdating scandal that is sweeping corporate America.