Nancy S Bryson

Nancy S. Bryson as a partner to the firm’s Washington office. Ms. Bryson, a longtime Washington, DC attorney who also worked in both the Departments of Justice and Labor, will head the firm's Food and Agriculture practice within Venable's Regulatory Group. Ms. Bryson has spent the last three years leading the USDA’s 230-attorney General Counsel’s office. In addition to its well known role as guardian of America’s food supply, the department is responsible for a vast array of related programs. The USDA also is the steward of the national forests, and it works to ensure open markets for U.S.agricultural products abroad. As General Counsel, Ms. Bryson participated in senior policy deliberation and helped formulate USDA policy. She regularly testified before both houses of Congress and was responsible for maintaining collaborative relationships with her counterparts at the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, Interior and Commerce, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative and the Office of Management and Budget. Ms. Bryson also directed department litigation and mediation in matters involving advertising, marketing and safety of food products, animal and plant health, animal identification, agricultural trade, agricultural antitrust issues, environmental and natural resources, and civil rights disputes. The sheer breadth of matters she worked on is reflected by a partial list of USDA programs that regularly called on her office for counsel, including: the Farm and Foreign Agricultural Service; the Food and Nutrition Service; the Food and Safety Inspection Service; the Agricultural Marketing Service; the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service; the Forest Service; the Natural Resources Conservation Service; and Rural Development. In addition to Ms. Bryson, Venable has recently added a number of top Washington regulatory players to its partnership. Asa Hutchinson, Undersecretary for the Department of Homeland Security, and John Muleta, chair of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, both came to the firm in the past two months. Prior to joining the USDA, Ms. Bryson was a longtime partner at the Washington law firm of Crowell & Moring LLP, where she worked chiefly on environmental and natural resource matters in litigation as well as in policy initiatives, licensing proceedings, rulemaking and legislative representations. . Before her stint at the DOJ, Ms. Bryson worked as Assistant Counsel for Appellate Litigation in the U.S. Department of Labor. Ms. Bryson earned her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center (1975) and B.A. from Boston University(1972).