Former FTC lawyers launch consumer protection law firm

By David Thomas

March 27 (Reuters) - A pair of former senior U.S. Federal Trade Commission lawyers on Monday said they have opened a new plaintiff-side consumer protection law firm, adding to the growing number of small firms launched by departing government attorneys during President Donald Trump's second term.

Monica Vaca and Kati Daffan said their new Washington, D.C.-based firm — Vaca Daffan LLP — will represent individual consumers as well as state and local governments.

Daffan cited consumer harms from artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency, saying state attorneys general were filling regulatory and enforcement gaps left open by the federal government. Those efforts "pick up from initiatives that started at the federal level that Monica and I were very involved with," she said.

The new firm also hopes to work on consumer protection issues facing low-income and immigrant communities, Daffan said.

Vaca served in the FTC for 23 years, rising to become deputy director of the agency's consumer protection bureau. Daffan, a 15-year veteran of the agency, is a former assistant director of the bureau's marketing practices division.

They said they left the FTC over concerns that the agency was no longer independent, and that its work was becoming politicized. In February 2025, Trump fired the agency's two Democratic commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, before their terms expired.

The moves made it "clear that the agency was no longer going to be the same agency it had been for the last 23 years that I worked there," Vaca said. She retired early from the FTC in June 2025. Daffan resigned in February.

Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices signaled in December that they would rule to uphold the legality of Trump's firing of Slaughter.

A spokesperson for the FTC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lawyers who have recently exited government service have been a driving force behind the launch of several smaller, so-called boutique law firms during Trump's second term, including the Civil Service Law Center , Simonsen Sussman and the Washington Litigation Group .

Jack Smith, the former U.S. Justice Department special counsel who prosecuted Trump following his first term in the White House, also opened a new law firm with three other former prosecutors.