John W. Barnum

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John’s practice focuses on international commercial arbitration and litigation, antitrust and competition law, and transportation law. He is the former managing partner of the Almaty office and of McGuireWoods Kazakhstan LLP, which was a subsidiary of McGuireWoods LLP until 2010.

In 1946, after his Freshman Year at Yale, John worked for Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation in Lima, Peru and worked his way to and from Peru as an Assistant Purser on the Grace Line. Upon graduation from Yale in 1949, John worked as a banker in Tangier and a Bache & Co. broker in Paris and London. In 1952, he joined the U.S. Army in Germany and was the Honor Graduate in his class at Armor OCS. He then served as a tank platoon leader in Korea. In 1957, he graduated from the Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and when his Law Journal duties were completed, he also attended law school at the Instituto de Derecho Internacional y Comparativo in Havana, Cuba.

From 1957 to 1971, John was an associate and in 1963 a partner in an AmLaw 100 firm in New York City where he represented Bethlehem Steel, Chemical Bank, CIBA-Geigy, General Motors, Lehman Brothers, Nestle and Olin Mathieson/Squibb in antitrust and other cases. From 1971 to 1977, John served as General Counsel and then Deputy Secretary of Transportation in Washington, D.C. In 1978, he joined an AmLaw 100 firm in its Washington, D.C., office where he was the managing partner and for eight years on the Management Committee elected by the New York firm. He again represented CIBA-Geigy (today Novartis) in environmental and insurance coverage litigation. He also represented Columbian banana and flower exporters, Federal Paper Board in E.U. competition matters, SKF in antitrust and international trade cases and various airlines and unions in merger cases. He remained a partner until joining McGuireWoods as a partner in 1995 in Brussels and Almaty, where he represented the Republic of Kazakhstan, its agencies, government officials and Kazakhstani companies in international commercial arbitration, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and other matters.

John is a member of the Connecticut, New York and Washington, D.C. Bars, and has been admitted to the Foreign Lawyers List of the Brussels Bar. John has been a lecturer on international arbitration at Vrije Universiteit Brussel since 2009. While at Cravath, he taught an Antitrust Law Series at the Practicing Law Institute in Venice and Cologne. While at DOT, he taught courses at the New School in New York. In addition to his native English, he is fluent in French and Spanish and modestly competent in German and Italian.