WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 25, 2025--
Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP is pleased to announce that Healthcare partner Todd Rosenberg has joined the firm in Washington, D.C. Rosenberg was most recently a partner at Crowell & Moring.
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Rosenberg is the 16 th partner over the last year to join Sheppard Mullin’s rapidly growing Healthcare team and follows most recent lateral partners Gene Besen, Margia Corner,Elisha Kobre,Scarlett Singleton Nokes,Hoyt Sze and Ashley Wheelock.
Rosenberg represents some of the country’s largest health plans in structuring and negotiating arrangements with pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). He also advises PBMs in joint ventures and other strategic transactions with industry partners. For more than two decades, Rosenberg has advised health plans, providers and other healthcare entities on innovative mergers, joint ventures and other strategic collaborations. Beyond healthcare, he has also worked with public and private companies in industries including government contracts, transportation, media, technology and telecommunications. Rosenberg has also represented private equity funds in connection with their investments in healthcare and other industries.
“We are excited to welcome Todd to the firm,” said Luca Salvi, Chair of Sheppard Mullin. “He is a widely respected healthcare attorney with a long track record of helping health plans grow and innovate through complex mergers and alliances, which will be a value-add to our firm and to our clients.”
“Health plans turn to us for their most important matters, be it strategic M&A, innovative joint ventures, high stakes litigation, navigating complex regulatory matters or value-based care and risk-based arrangements,” said Amanda Zablocki, Co-Leader of Sheppard Mullin’s Healthcare industry team. “Todd’s extensive experience working with health plans and PBMs complements our existing practice while adding critical depth in each of these areas. We are seeing a lot of legislative and industry focus on PBMs and drug pricing these days, and our firm is helping to navigate the upcoming changes and create innovative and practical solutions to rising drug costs. We are delighted to have Todd on our team.”
“I’m very happy to be a part of the Healthcare team’s continued growth on the East Coast,” Rosenberg said. “Sheppard Mullin’s world-class Healthcare team has a reputation for excellence, and its full-service, coast-to-coast practice will help my clients continue to grow strategically.”
Rosenberg received his B.A., magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Emory University and his J.D., cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He is active in public service in Washington, D.C. and serves on multiple community and other nonprofit boards.
Sheppard Mullin has one of the most active and diversified Healthcare teams in the country, representing all segments of the industry. The firm is a leader in helping health insurers and health plans considering convergence transactions that result in successful plan/provider alignment, navigating evolving regulatory changes and compliance, and defending in high-stakes litigation. Recent successes include representing private equity firm client Clayton, Dubilier & Rice in launching Mosaic Health; helping SCAN Health Plan secure a major victory that will allow it to recoup more than $250 million in Medicare Advantage payments, after challenging CMS’s revised calculation of “STAR Ratings” for 2024; and guiding Molina Healthcare, Inc. through the healthcare regulatory aspects of Molina’s acquisition of Brand New Day and Central Health Plan of California, both wholly owned subsidiaries of Bright Health Company of California, Inc.
About Sheppard Mullin’s Healthcare Team
Sheppard Mullin’s 230-attorney, national Healthcare industry team has been named a Health Care Practice Group of the Year by Law360 four times in seven years. Working in all sectors of healthcare with industry-leading and growing companies, disruptive start-up clients and healthcare-focused investors, Sheppard Mullin is a go-to firm for innovative transactions and joint ventures, regulatory solutions, population health management, global risk and value-based contracting, technology transactions and privacy matters. The team offers significant experience in cybersecurity, tax, non-profit, employment and labor, real estate, artificial intelligence, antitrust, litigation and finance.
About Sheppard Mullin’s Corporate and Securities Practice
One of the firm's core strengths, Sheppard Mullin’s Corporate and Securities practice group, assists clients throughout the United States and abroad in maximizing their business opportunities. We represent clients that range from private to public companies and from startups and emerging businesses to international corporations. We are proud to offer CRADLE TO LIQUIDITY ® services. We provide general business legal advice, assist in structuring and implementing major transactions, prepare agreements to address unique business arrangements, and consult with clients to resolve major business and ownership issues. We handle such matters as initial and later-stage venture and other financings; leveraged buyouts and recapitalizations; public offerings; mergers and acquisitions; SEC compliance; private equity transactions; real estate capital markets transactions; corporate, LLC and partnership formation; and corporate partnering, joint venture and other strategic alliance arrangements. Because of our diverse client base, we have experience representing substantial entities in complicated multinational and multistate transactions, as well as advising smaller and emerging clients on the full spectrum of business matters.
About Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP
Sheppard Mullin is a full-service AmLaw 50 firm with more than 1,100 attorneys in 16 offices located in the United States, Europe and Asia. Since 1927, industry-leading companies have turned to Sheppard Mullin to handle corporate and technology matters, high-stakes litigation and complex financial transactions. In the U.S., the firm's clients include nearly half of the Fortune 100. For more information, please visit www.sheppardmullin.com.
Todd Rosenberg, Partner
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
