Washington Lawyer March/April 2026
By John Murph
Walking through the offices of Wilkinson Stekloff LLP in Washington, D.C., one of the first things you might notice is the number of young attorneys at the firm. Many are dressed casually — more like being in a startup tech company than a traditional litigation firm — giving off an atmosphere that feels energetic and forward-thinking.
The boutique firm’s makeup is intentional. Specializing in product liability, class action, and antitrust cases, Wilkinson Stekloff has built a model that gives new associates substantial, hands-on courtroom experience early in their careers, not after a yearslong wait typical in Big Law firms.
“There are a lot of great attributes, qualities, and development that you can get in Big Law, but it’s hard to develop those skills for a trial because you need a lot of repetition. Most Big Law firms rotate the same people with partners,” says Beth Wilkinson, one of the firm’s founding partners. “So, a lot of young attorneys don’t get that trial experience.”
Brian Stekloff, the firm’s other founding partner, says Big Law tends to be very hierarchical. “The junior associate reports to the mid-level associate, who reports to the senior associate, who reports to the junior partner, who reports to the senior partner. If you are a younger attorney, it is hard to get exposure to a lot of the strategy of a trial case,” Stekloff says.
Thinking back to his own experience as an early career attorney, Stekloff says it’s “easy to get lost in Big Law” because of its structure. “[New attorneys] aren’t seeing different types of cases or having exposure to different clients and experiences. That was my fear when I first went into Big Law,” he adds.
A decade before Wilkinson and Stekloff formalized their partnership in 2016, the two worked together at Latham & Watkins LLP. Wilkinson was a rising trial lawyer who became partner and cochair of the firm’s white-collar practice group, while Stekloff was an associate. Yearning for trial experience, Stekloff says he walked into Wilkinson’s office one day seeking a mentor.
“She said, ‘Everyone gets a shot to work with me. If you do well, you will continue to work with me. But if it does not go so well, we will see,’” Stekloff recalls. “We worked together 99 percent of my time at that firm.”
Straight Into the Deep End
After departing Latham & Watkins, Stekloff became a federal public defender in Florida while Wilkinson went on to serve as general counsel at Fannie Mae before joining Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in 2009. Stekloff ended up working for the same firm in 2010 before moving on to Covington & Burling LLP in 2015 as special counsel.
The two reunited in 2016 and, joined by four other attorneys, launched the trial-focused boutique Wilkinson, Walsh + Eskovitz LLP. As the other founding partners moved on over the years, the firm ultimately evolved into today’s Wilkinson Stekloff.
Rather than focusing on scale, Wilkinson Stekloff decided to prioritize finding top-tier clerkship talent and giving young lawyers meaningful trial experience, a philosophy that continues to draw candidates looking for substantive work over firm size. As of mid-December 2025, the firm had 50 attorneys, including 11 new associates who joined in November.
When interviewing potential associates, Stekloff informs them that they will be thrown into the deep end of work right away. “[It’s] because we have lots of opportunities, and we are not going to silo [them],” he explains. “We are not going to limit them to just doing research projects. We are going to ask them to be involved in important strategy meetings and important witness meetings to help us really prepare the witnesses. The associates are going to act well beyond their years out of law school the minute they join us.”
Caroline Li joined as an associate in September 2021 after clerking for Judge Pamela K. Chen of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. “I had such a great time in that chambers’ dynamic,” says Li. “We were taking on so much responsibility. It was a ton of work for someone straight out of law school. The learning curve was so steep but rewarding.”
After her clerkship, Li saw little incentive in joining a Big Law firm where it was unlikely she would be involved in litigation strategy. Cindy Hong, Li’s mentor while working as a summer associate at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP, encouraged her to apply to Wilkinson Stekloff to gain substantial litigation experience.
“That was my first time hearing about the firm,” Li says. “I went through the interview process and met everyone at the firm. The work sounded exactly [like] what I was interested in.”
Deon McCray brought some Big Law experience with him when he joined Wilkinson Stekloff in April 2024. “I was interested in antitrust cases, and Jones Day has a great antitrust litigation group,” McCray says. After six months at that firm, McCray says he was eager to do more than document review.
Following his brief stint at Jones Day, McCray clerked for one year for Judge Richard M. Gergel of the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina. McCray recalls dissecting cases in Gergel’s chambers after trials. “He was training [the clerks] to think like a trial lawyer. We would spend a lot of time thinking about trial strategy,” McCray says.
McCray first learned of Wilkinson Stekloff when its lawyers appeared before Gergel’s court for a product liability case involving aqueous film-forming foams. “That’s how I was introduced to them. Near the end of my clerkship, I was like, ‘I am going to go work there,’” he says.
After Li and McCray joined the firm, they hit the ground running. “Because we’re so trial-centric, the firm really makes an effort to get associates out to trial right away,” Li says. “I joined the firm on a Tuesday morning. I came to the D.C. office for onboarding, got my laptop, and then by noon I was on a flight to Los Angeles to go to my first trial — Clark v. Monsanto. That was just an insane experience for that being my first day at the firm,” Li says.
“Even though I knew so little about that case, I was assigned with other associates to help prep a witness. I had never been in that environment before,” Li continues. “I didn’t know how trials worked at all. I was there for my own education. And that was just so eye-opening. It really sets the context for all the work that leads up to trial. After that, I have seen every stage of litigation from pre-complaint to discovery, expert discovery, and class certification to the actual lead-up to the trial. I have done a lot of substantive work here as an associate.”
While McCray has not yet gone to trial, he had been assigned to three separate matters in the period leading up to the eve of trial. “One of the reasons we love it here is because all of our work is really important,” McCray says. “Most of us have clerked, doing important work in the federal justice system. So, [with] that experience, we cannot then go back to having to submit emails for review. We just cannot go back to that.”
Breaking Free from the Billable Hour
In addition to pushing new associates into the heart of litigation from day one, Wilkinson Stekloff also takes an uncommon business approach: charging clients a flat fee instead of billing by the hour.
“If somebody writes a good brief or a good outline, we can tell. We do not need to see their hours,” Wilkinson explains. “Someone could bill 100 hours, and the brief is not very good. Or they could bill 30 hours, and the brief is excellent. I don’t think we always saw a direct correlation between the amount of hours [and the result].”
Wilkinson notes that traditional law firms can be weighed down by layers of bureaucracy and extensive back-and-forth with clients. “Associates do not always feel like they can do what is actually best for the case; they can only do what they get billing credit for. It creates competition among your teammates, which we did not like,” she says.
“We get paid for what we actually bring to the table — our judgment, our perseverance, our willingness to do everything we need to do to win the case,” continues Wilkinson. “That’s not measured very accurately by the billable hour.”
Stekloff believes that eschewing the billable hour model promotes more work efficiency. “It’s also good for the firm culture and training young attorneys,” he says. “For example, when I was at my last Big Law [firm] and I would have a deposition, wonderful clients would ask, ‘Why do you need to bring an attorney with you to the deposition? You should be able to manage the box and ask the questions. You do not need an associate with you.’ And it was true that I could do that. But it wasn’t good for the associates who were working on the case.”
At Wilkinson Stekloff, “the clients benefit if we bring the associates to the strategy meetings. The clients are not paying by the person; they are paying for the work that we do,” Wilkinson says. “And they know that our associates are more strategic and better when they really understand what is going on in the case. So, not having billable hours really advanced our ability to train associates.”
So, with this model, how does an associate progress to partnership at the firm? “To become a partner, we need to be able to almost hand the case over to you and you can run it,” Stekloff says. “And Beth and I don’t have to pay that much attention to it. That doesn’t mean we’re not involved or that we won’t be in contact with the client. But the day-to-day work is really being managed by [the associate].”
“It’s somewhat subjective,” Stekloff adds. “We always get a lot of feedback on how clients react to our different attorneys and what confidence they have in them. That, to us, is the ultimate sign of who is ready to be partner. When we have a client that isn’t paying as much attention to what Beth and I think and their calls are going directly to the counsel, or the senior associate, because that is the person that they trust, then it’s a sign to us that someone is ready to be promoted to partnership.”
The firm looks for a potential partner’s ability to lead a team in every way, Wilkinson says. “That person must be willing to say, ‘This is what I think we should do,’ even if it doesn’t turn out to be the right strategy, or we all refine it together. That takes a lot of confidence,” she says.
As the firm marks its 10th anniversary this year, Stekloff says he is most proud of the people who have turned it into a success story. “We have built this place where people support each other, have grace with each other, teach each other, and really care about each other,” Stekloff says. “We have also proven that if you have a diverse workforce, you can succeed ... You can represent the most important companies in their most important matters in a very diverse group, led by an incredible woman. That says a lot.”
D.C. Bar staff writer John Murph has received three Luminary Awards from the National Association for Bar Professionals for his feature articles. Reach him at [email protected].
