Jones Day's DC Litigation Head Takes Leading Walmart Post
Kerri Ruttenberg.
A high-profile Washington, D.C., trial lawyer is joining Walmart Inc. as its new senior vice president of litigation.
Kerri Ruttenberg will join the big-box retailer July 1 from Jones Day, where she is a partner and head of litigation for the firm’s D.C. office. Ruttenberg, who succeeds Mike Bennett, who retired last year, will relocate to Northwest Arkansas for the position, according to a notice that Karen Roberts, Walmart’s executive vice president and general counsel, distributed Thursday to the company’s global governance team.
Roberts described Ruttenberg as “a well-regarded litigator with first-chair trial expertise” in False Claims Act, antitrust, securities, intellectual property, corporate fiduciary duty and white-collar criminal matters who has represented domestic and international clients in civil, criminal and appellate actions in federal and state courts nationwide.
Through a Walmart spokesperson, Ruttenberg declined to comment on her move but said in a statement that “the digital transformation” underway at Walmart “makes this an exciting time to join.”
"I look forward to immersing in the company’s complex legal issues and working alongside a talented legal team,” she added.
In 2014, Ruttenberg represented the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in its suit against the U.S. Department of Justice to obtain the so-called “discovery blue book,” a prosecution playbook written and distributed after the government botched the case against the late Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens.
In 2012, she successfully represented international moving and shipping company Gosselin Worldwide Moving in a False Claims Act case in which the judge rejected a $50 million penalty as "grossly disproportional" to the fraud allegations against the company.
And while at LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & MacRae, the predecessor to now-defunct Dewey & LeBoeuf, in 2006, Ruttenberg represented former AOL executive Kent Wakeford, who had been charged with corporate fraud in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.
Her legal work on such high-profile matters likely will come in handy, as Walmart is facing some of its own, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year.
For example, in addition to being under investigation by the Justice Department and SEC for possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Walmart is a defendant in a multidistrict litigation in Ohio federal court, as well as in similar cases pending in various state courts, stemming from the opioid epidemic.
Prior to joining Dewey & LeBoeuf in 2006, Ruttenberg, a graduate of The George Washington University Law School, was an associate at in the D.C. offices of King & Spalding and Cozen O’Connor, according to her LinkedIn profile.
