By Daphne Zhang

Law360 (May 14, 2020, 4:19 PM EDT) --

Scott DeVries

Hunton Andrews Kurth LLP has hired away the chair of Winston & Strawn LLP's insurance recovery group as part of a move to bolster its insurance coverage practice on the West Coast.

Scott P. DeVries, a former partner and chair of the insurance recovery team at Winston, joined Hunton's San Francisco office as a special counsel on Monday. He has been temporarily working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

DeVries, 65, has built a client base mostly from insured businesses over the last three decades. He told Law360 on Wednesday that he was attracted to Hunton because the firm does not represent insurance companies, and would not pose conflicts to his current policyholder clients.

He decided to leave Winston after 13 years because of a divergence of goals.

"A few years ago Winston made the decision to start moving in the direction of representing insurance companies rather than policyholders. That decision got locked in late last year," he explained.

After discussion with Winston's management, DeVries said, they both agreed he was no longer a good fit for the company's new path. So he started looking at various opportunities.

DeVries first spoke with Hunton's managing partner Shannon Broome and other executives in January about the potential move, he said. He visited their office, where they video chatted together with other Hunton offices.

"One of the really neat things Hunton did, which I have not seen from others, is that they make a point for people at my level to spend time by videoconference or in person with the chairman of the firm and much of the executive committee," DeVries said. "So everybody sees if they fit and everybody in the firm is comfortable with people coming on board."

Walter Andrews, head of Hunton's insurance coverage practice, said in a statement that DeVries' experience is "a perfect complement to the firm's robust insurance coverage practice and his addition enhances our presence on the West Coast and nationally."

DeVries said he was also attracted by Hunton's extensive insurance recovery practice group of up to 27 attorneys around the country, and its vibrant office with environment, energy and real estate cross-disciplinary practices in San Francisco. He likes that Hunton is an international firm with a substantial practice in the U.S. and "it is a conservative yet entrepreneurial organization," he said.

"You need to be conservative to be viable at any time, especially now," DeVries said, referring to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Before his time at Winston, DeVries served as the managing partner at Nossaman LLP. He has represented insured companies in disputes involving insurance rights and recovery, environmental contamination coverage, property collapse, business interruption losses, director and officer claims, employment liability, and class actions, among others.

"Scott is a widely respected attorney who has tried some of the largest insurance, mass tort and class action cases in the country in addition to securing landmark insurance decisions in the California Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit," Andrews said.

DeVries said he helped client Aerojet win a California Supreme Court decision in a case over environmental cleanup costs at a site in Sacramento. In that case, Aerojet-General Corp. v. Transport Indemnity Co. , the court found that such costs are damages and recoverable under commercial general liability policies, DeVries said.

"We argued in front of the court of appeal, and the questions were, 'Is groundwater contamination property damage?' and 'Is the governmental clean-up order something tantamount to a suit?'" he added.

Looking back after decades of representing business insurance policyholders, DeVries said insurance litigation was the last thing he would have considered in law school.

"I remember in law school signing up for an insurance class senior year, thinking, 'This is the most boring material I have ever encountered in my life,' and walking out. I went back to the bookstore and returned the books," he recalled.

Thirty years later, finding himself at the center of what he calls "a remarkable volume" of business interruption insurance litigations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, he said he appreciates the "robustness and the fun" of his practice area.

--Editing by Marygrace Murphy.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated DeVries' age. The error has been corrected.

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