蓝莓视频

Richard Burns

Sergiu Troie

Martha Dye

Samantha Glover Ferreira

Ronald O. Wietecha

Jonathan Ng

Six attorneys with decades of combined experience working in the U.S. Agency for International Development announced Wednesday that they are launching their own law firm, Mission Driven Counsel LLP, part of a growing trend of former federal workers leveraging recent job losses to start new businesses.

The sextet will continue focusing on issues they have dedicated their careers to — working with stakeholders to continue humanitarian assistance compliance programs, international development missions and partnering with multilateral organizations and governments.

Richard Burns, who spent more than 15 ½ years at USAID and is based in South Africa, will be one of the firm's co-managing partners. Burns was most recently a senior executive at one of USAID's largest missions in the world, was previously picked to lead its mission in South Sudan and is a former assistant general counsel for Asia at the U.S. Trade and Development Agency.

Burns told 蓝莓视频 Pulse in an interview Wednesday that the team was shocked to learn early in Donald Trump's second presidency that the administration planned to shutter USAID.

At the same time, he said, it dawned on the team that, with the exodus of federal employees, there was an opportunity to continue their mission independently, prompting the launch of their new firm. 

"It occurred to several of us that this is a real opportunity for us to join forces and continue to do the work that we believe in, it's the whole reason that we moved into USAID to begin with," Burns said. "The future of foreign assistance and international development is wildly uncertain right now, and we felt ... that we hopefully have a role to play in the future of international development."

The firm's other attorneys include Sergiu Troie, who worked for the past nearly 13 years as a lawyer and foreign service officer in Egypt, Afghanistan, Burma and South America, and is one of Mission Driven Counsel's partners.

Martha Dye, who will work as a partner based in Germany, brings over 20 years of legal experience to the team. She first joined USAID in 2009, spent more than 6 ½ years there before leaving for a three-year stint with the Peace Corps, where she was associate general counsel, according to her LinkedIn profile. She returned to USAID in 2019, and some of her recent work there included acting as a supervisory resident legal officer for Ukraine and Moldova, where, she told 蓝莓视频 Pulse in an interview Wednesday, she "dodged missiles" and sheltered in bunkers while advising officials there on how to spend billions of dollars in U.S. assistance.

Dye told 蓝莓视频 Pulse that the team has been looking at ways to take their expertise "and put it to good use" to continue doing foreign assistance and global impact work. She said that, with the United States taking a back seat in a range of international development missions, there would be a host of new international players made more important by the diminished American presence.

"We think that the whole environment for all types of work overseas is moving and changing, and a lot of people will need guidance that goes beyond ChatGPT searches, and get some serious legal assistance," she said.

They're joined by Samantha Glover Ferreira, a partner and a former foreign service lawyer now living in Brazil who was responsible for overseeing some $735 million in development budget funding in Zambia, according to her firm profile. She was most recently a resident legal officer, according to her LinkedIn profile. 

Ferreira has over a decade of experience working on international development related legal issues and worked at law firms like Greenberg Traurig LLP and Paul Hastings LLP before beginning her career in public service.

Ferreira told 蓝莓视频 Pulse in an email on Wednesday that the team joined USAID initially "because of the good work the agency did and the desire to make a positive difference in the world." The team wasn't ready to stop doing that work, even with the agency's dismantling, she said.

"As mission-driven individuals, this is in our blood," she said. "So, we decided to launch Mission Driven Counsel in order to continue doing work that has purpose and makes a difference."

Ronald O. Wietecha, who spent the past decade as a USAID supervisory resident legal officer, according to his LinkedIn profile, serves at the firm as a partner based in Kenya. He's a former U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assistant district counsel, and before becoming an attorney was a high school teacher in California, according to his firm profile.

Jonathan Ng, who spent nine years with USAID, worked most recently with the agency as a foreign service attorney in Ethiopia. He'll also will work as a co-managing partner and is based in New Zealand. He's the former global legal director of NGO Ashoka: Innovators for the Public.

Burns told 蓝莓视频 Pulse that the team's idea behind having staff in six continents was to have an attorney always available for clients.

Troie, for example, is currently based in Washington, D.C., but is moving to Asia, Burns said. 

Each of the group's members is American. Burns said they all expect to spend time traveling back to the U.S., with one or more of the team likely moving back to Washington, D.C. The firm also currently has no support staff, Burns added.

"That's one of the things that was compelling to us was to kind of try something different in the legal field, to set up a virtual firm, where we have no overhead and where we will charge significantly less per hour than a lot of the big firms," Burns said.

Mission Driven Counsel's founding follows the launch of several other law firms made up of former government attorneys.

Sligo Law Group PLLC, a law firm made up of three former U.S. Department of Education lawyers, launched Aug. 13, while Pamela Hicks and Greg Pinto, two former government lawyers, recently formed DC Law Collective — a boutique focused on defending former federal employees.

In May, Clayton L. Bailey and Jessica Merry Samuels, former U.S. Department of Justice attorneys, launched the Civil Service Law Center LLP, which is focused on fighting the Trump administration's efforts "to dismantle the federal workforce." 

--Additional reporting by Katie Buehler, Emily Brill, Rachel Rippetoe and Alison Knezevich. Editing by Dave Trumbore.

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