Lanny Davis

Lanny Davis, a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, is a partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the global law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Between 1996 and 1998 Mr. Davis served as special counsel to President Clinton and in that position acted as the White House spokesman for various congressional campaign-finance investigations and other "scandal" allegations against the Clinton administration. He now leads Orrick's unique law practice group, Legal Crisis Communications, advising public and private companies on how to deal with high-profile legal crises in the media and among stakeholders.

Mr. Davis's memoir of his work as President Clinton's crisis communicator was published in 1999 and entitled "Truth to Tell: Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education." Tom Brokaw, formerly of NBC News, said of the work, "Lanny Davis has written a book that should be required reading for all Washington officials and journalists alike. It's an instructive and cautionary tale of the constant struggle to know the truth of what is going on at the highest degree of
government."

Davis is also the recent author of "Scandal: How 'Gotcha' Politics Is Destroying America," published by Palgrave Macmillan in September 2006. Harvard Law Professor Alan M. Dershowitz wrote this about Davis's latest book: "Davis is that rare insider who is capable of being fair to allsides. He is willing to cast blame on his own party, his own candidates and even his own self, along with those on the other side who deserve blame. This perceptive look into the Washington world of equal opportunity scandal mongering must be read by Democrats and Republicans alike — and by all fair-minded people who want to end the politics of mutually assured destruction."

Davis has appeared many times as a political commentator for Sunday political talk shows on every major network and cable outlet, including CNN's "Larry King Live" and "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer," NBC's "Meet the Press," ABC's "This Week," CBS's "Face the Nation," Fox News's "O'Reilly Factor" and MSNBC's "Brian Williams Hour." He has authored numerous op-ed columns and pieces in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and other publications. Davis and his unique law-media-strategic communications groups have been featured in numerous newspaper articles across the country as well as in such magazines as Forbes and Fortune. Mr. Davis lives in Potomac, Md., with his wife, Carolyn Atwell-Davis, who is the legislative affairs director for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. They have four children and five grandchildren.