Stacy Frazier Clifford Chance LLP has hired UnitedHealth Group Inc.'s former deputy general counsel, who is joining the Washington, D.C., team to work on antitrust issues related to transitions, litigation and compliance, the firm announced Monday.

Stacy Frazier has joined Clifford Chance as a partner, where she'll combine her in-house experience managing a broad portfolio of antitrust issues with her background in private practice. She'll work on completion law matters and consumer protection cases, with a particular focus on transactional work and helping senior executives understand regulations.

Frazier has previously secured global clearance for transactions across various industries and has worked in the aerospace and the energy sectors, with medical devices, and on healthcare matters.

A Harvard Law School graduate, Frazier started her legal career as a WilmerHale counsel, her LinkedIn profile says. She joined General Electric as an executive counsel, working on completion law and policy, and spent more than 6.5 years there before joining UnitedHealth Group in 2023.

In an interview with Law360 Pulse on Monday, Frazier said she loved working as an in-house attorney but felt she was ready to take her experience and leverage it for clients in her new role.

"It was just trying to take that next step into more than just a single company, a single industry, and find somewhere where I could be a little bit broader in my practice than at a single company," Frazier said.

Frazier said moving to General Electric after her role in private practice was one of her introductions to working with a variety of industries, an opportunity to "dabble in some of the industries that are most important to American consumers," like healthcare devices, energy matters and aviation.

"And then I really was fascinated by our healthcare system, which is incredibly complex, as I think everybody knows," she said. "And the opportunity to deep dive into that was fascinating to me. And so again, it was this focus on industries and brands that are common and known to people and important to people and hit their pocketbooks that I really liked focusing on."

Frazier added: "And so the transition [to] Clifford Chance incorporates those different industries but also really allows me to also look at some new ones."

Agencies like the Federal Trade Commission are focusing more on the oversight of healthcare companies, and the company Frazier is departing, UnitedHealth Group, recently had a deal to buy Amedisys Inc. come under scrutiny.

She said she's looking to bring in her skills helping executives understand "incredibly complicated doctrine and distill it into bite-sized concepts."

"You might have an incredibly important meeting coming up, or an important issue, and the only chance you get to brief an executive is 15 seconds outside their office, from one meeting to another," Frazier said. "And I think that that's the way our world is working now, and that's what I really think that I can bring to Clifford Chance … building the actionable, strategic advice that companies can actually act on."

She added: "It's one thing to know antitrust law, but I think that translation ability is really, really important to actually help companies do business in today's very constantly changing antitrust climate."

Marc Besen, the chair of Clifford Chance's global antitrust group, said in a statement that the firm was looking forward to adding Frazier's perspective to the team.

"Stacy's broad experience in-house at multiple Fortune 100 companies will be immensely helpful for clients looking to align strategies both globally and in the U.S., enabling them to structure and implement transactions with foresight, confidence and alignment across jurisdictions," Besen said.

Leigh Oliver, the head of the firm's U.S. antitrust practice and co-chair of the healthcare and life sciences sector, told Law360 Pulse in an email Monday that Frazier's experience "in a large law firm then in-house with GE and UnitedHealth Group is highly valuable to our clients."

"At Clifford Chance, we listen to our clients and create advantage for them through delivering practical advice based on deep experience," Oliver said. "Adding Stacy to our global antitrust team further strengthens our offering."