Litigating Nationally, Living Fully in the Mountain West

Nicole Hancock
Partner, Litigation

Abstract

Nicole Hancock, Partner in the Litigation group at Stoel Rives’ Boise office, shares how practicing in Idaho’s close-knit legal market provided a foundation for building a national litigation practice. Leveraging the firm’s platform, she has represented Idaho-based clients across the country, working alongside local counsel to combine deep knowledge of client industries with jurisdiction-specific expertise. Her work includes leading a cross-office team in a record-setting, multi-month USDA modernization hearing on behalf of the National Milk Federation, resulting in significant Federal Milk Marketing Order changes.

Transcript

I am Nicole Hancock, and I am a partner in our Boise office. One of the things that is best about Boise is that it is still a small market. We have, I think for 10 years, been at the top of the country for the fastest growing state on a per capita basis and it does not seem to be that we are slowing down. What that means is, as a small town it is easy to make a name for yourself here. You network easily with other people in the market, and you can build a name and a reputation for yourself. I think being on the Stoel Rives platform, it has allowed me to develop a reputation and brand as a strong litigator in the Idaho market. We have great businesses that operate out of Idaho on the national level. In representing our Idaho clients, I was able to start to grow my practice onto a national scale where I would do their litigation in other jurisdictions. I have tried cases in Louisiana, Texas and New York and across the country in various states where clients have been sued or involved in lawsuits in those locations. When I am not licensed in that state we work with local counsel just so that we also have kind of that local knowledge and benefit. Having our clients be represented by somebody who knows their business, knows their culture, knows how their business runs, or their industry runs, that is valuable enough to our clients to take us into those other markets. From that, we have been able to develop a national reputation where we end up representing different industries on the national level.

Most recently we represented the National Milk Federation, which is a federation of all of the dairy cooperatives and dairy producers in the country who are members. We represented them in a modernization hearing before the United States Department of Agriculture in a record setting length of a hearing out of Carmel, Indiana over six months. It was about 12 weeks’ worth of regulatory evidentiary hearings before an administrative law judge. And our client base that we represented, or the membership that made up that federation was from every state in the country. We have been able to just work as cross-office teams. We staffed that case with attorneys from Minneapolis, from Portland, and from Boise, Idaho. We all worked together to service that client and we ended up with a really great result for that client, and one that that are still celebrating today because the new Federal Milk Marketing Order modifications have gone into place beginning June 1st of this year.

I just think that Stoel Rives is an amazing law firm. I have been at the firm since 2003 and so for me, it is the majority of my career, and this is where I plan to retire from when I am done practicing law. It is not just because it is a good law firm, it is because of the people that are here. We practice with really smart people, but they are also really good people. They brag about their families; they love the other activities that they have outside of the practice of the law. They are not just a lawyer, but they are so much more. I think it is all of those things that go into making this a great working environment. We hear a lot of criticisms when people are looking at private practice about how difficult it is to maintain a busy legal practice in private practice. It is true that we work very hard and we work long hours sometimes, and we also get to counterbalance that being with really good people that respect and value your own families and your own outside activities. We have a good balance to the extent that you can have balance when you are in private practice and you are working hard for your clients. We do so in a way that I think makes us better lawyers. We are more well-rounded. This is just overall an amazing platform where you get good complex legal matters, but you also get a good life experience as well, where you can spend your entire career here and not feel like you are burned out, or you are too exhausted, and this is a three-year stint, and you have to move on just to go recoup from it. This is not a place that is supposed to be a three-year career. This is a place where people can come, and I think that you can stay for your entire career and look back over it and know that it was the right choice for you.