Lisa Zornberg named City Hall’s next top lawyer

Surrounded by some of the top women officials in his administration, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced that he’s appointing Lisa Zornberg, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and a white collar defense attorney, as the city’s next chief counsel.

Brendan McGuire, who has served in that role since the beginning of the Adams administration, announced in the spring that he would be leaving the post. 

Zornberg’s appointment, first reported on Wednesday afternoon by The New York Times, comes as the city faces a suite of acute crises – some of which involve litigation, including the sheltering of asylum-seekers and the chaos in Rikers Island jails. Zornberg declined to comment when asked at a press conference on Wednesday about whether the city will continue its attempts to modify the city’s right to shelter mandate, saying her start date isn’t for a few weeks.

Though Adams has often brushed off the suggestion that being New York City mayor is one of the hardest jobs in the world, McGuire has had a front row seat to just how challenging it is. “You say you’re waiting for this job to get hard,” McGuire said to Adams at the press conference. “From where I sit, it looks pretty damn hard.” Hearing that, the mayor laughed and exchanged a nod with Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom.

Zornberg spent much of her career as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and served as chief of the office’s criminal division. “She has taken on the corrupt and the criminal, keeping our nation and our city safe,” Adams said of Zornberg, a Brooklyn native. For the past few years, she has worked as a litigation partner at the white shoe firm Debevoise & Plimpton, in their white collar and regulatory defense group. 

McGuire, the son of former New York City Police Department Commissioner Robert McGuire, said that he’s known Zornberg for a long time. She was one of the first people to interview him when he was applying to the U.S. attorney’s office nearly 20 years ago, he said.

Sending off McGuire, Adams alluded to the fact that the post is an around-the-clock job, and will be for Zornberg too. “Brendan, I cannot thank you enough,” Adams said. “I told your wife, ‘You have your husband back.’”