Nossaman Partner,
Paul Quinn, was mentioned in the "People" section of the
National Law Journal.
Paul Quinn has two reasons to celebrate: a new job with the law firm Nossaman and a recent 75th-birthday bash at the Irish Embassy. During more than 40 years as a lawyer and lobbyist, Quinn worked on the Northern Ireland peace process and got to know the Irish ambassador, which led to the birthday arrangements. "We had Sen. Jack Reed there, Sen. Pat Leahy, and my three brothers, and everybody behaved well. How many times do you have all those Irishmen together and have them behave well?" he boasts.
A Rhode Island native, Quinn earned a law degree from Georgetown University in 1961. He started on Capitol Hill working for then-Sen. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., before joining a firm known as Wilkinson, Cragun & Barker (now Wilkinson Barker Knauer). He wound up spending some 35 years there, becoming a name partner along the way. "When I first joined the firm, there were only about six attorneys," Quinn recalls. "They were all Republicans, and they were all from Utah originally.... They finally acknowledged, a few years after Jack Kennedy was elected, that Democrats really were in charge. So they needed a Democrat -- and they hired me."
The connection he made with an early client, the American Society of Travel Agents, led him into doing extensive work on travel-industry issues over the years. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Quinn represented clients advocating the eventual breakup of AT&T. He spent the past five years with Buchanan Ingersoll; at Nossaman, he will handle legislative and regulatory work as a lawyer and lobbyist.
Quinn has witnessed many a regime change in Washington, giving him some perspective whenever the chattering class becomes hyperbolic. "I'm amused by this ongoing debate about whether the system [in Congress] is broken or not. The fact of it is, the system is essentially as it was 250 years ago. It works pretty well in some ways and doesn't work so well in others," he says. "What has changed over the years, rather dramatically, is the election process. The influence of money and the dominance of the media and the resulting impact it has on determining who is and who is not elected, and who is re-elected, is perhaps the area of most substantial change."
Unlike some seasoned Washington hands, Quinn doesn't think that the caliber of the nation's public servants has declined. "Every year you have this new crop of college graduates or graduate school students come to Washington with this enthusiasm. And that's sort of the beauty of the concept," he says.
Quinn maintains a home in Newport, R.I. His brother Thomas is a partner at Venable and formerly worked for O'Connor & Hannan, which merged with Nossaman in 2008. -- G.S.