John P. Schmitz

John advises on high-stakes business and regulatory matters spanning American and German/EU public policy and law. His clients have included Airbus, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, General Electric, Bertelsmann, Microsoft, Pfizer, DuPont, Deutsche Telekom, and Lufthansa. He brings a deep working knowledge of all three branches of the U.S. government, with particular focus on antitrust, media, energy, and environmental issues.

John received his J.D. from Stanford University Law School in 1981 and an M.S. in Economics from the California Institute of Technology in 1978, where his research took him to the U.K. to interview Members of Parliament. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Georgetown University in 1976 with a B.A. in Economics and was admitted to the Phi Beta Kappa Society. While at Georgetown, he worked for two Members of Congress and learned the legislative process first hand.

After law school, John clerked for the Honorable Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia and served at the Justice Department as Special Assistant to William Baxter, Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, during the Reagan Administration.

In 1984, a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellowship took him to Germany, where he worked in the office of Bundestag Member Matthias Wissmann in Bonn and in the Office of General Counsel at Robert Bosch GmbH in Stuttgart. He returned to Wilmer Cutler Pickering LLP in 1985 before rejoining the Reagan Administration as Deputy Legal Counsel to then-Vice President George H.W. Bush, a role he held for three years. From 1989 to 1993, he served as White House Deputy Counsel throughout the senior Bush Administration, working extensively on the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, regulatory reform, Forests for the Future, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and helping Barbara Bush establish her Foundation for Family Literacy.

John accompanied President and Mrs. Bush on several trips to Berlin and to Point Alpha, where President Bush was honored as one of the Three Fathers of German Unity alongside Chancellor Kohl and President Gorbachev. In 2008, he helped raise the funds behind the PBS Houston documentary The Wall: A World Divided, personally organizing filmed interviews with prominent German leaders, including Chancellor Kohl.

In 1993, John joined Mayer Brown LLP as a Partner to open the firm's first German office, in Berlin. Over the following sixteen years he built a thriving U.S./German and European practice across Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne, and Brussels. Fluent in German, he was one of the first Americans admitted to the Berlin Bar as a Rechtsanwalt. Before joining Prime Policy Group as a Managing Director, he was a Principal at Bingham Consulting and a Partner at Bingham LLP. He has served on the boards of the Atlantic Council, the American Council on Germany, C2ES (formerly the Pew Center on Global Climate Change), the Aspen Institute, IESE, and the Friends of Dresden.

His honors include the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit, First Class (Deutsches Bundesverdienstkreuz Erste Klasse) from the President of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1990, awarded for his work promoting U.S.-German relations and German unification; the Ellis Island Medal of Honor (1990); the Distinguished German American of the Year Award from the United German American Committee (2000); and the Robert Bosch Fellow of the Year Award from the Robert Bosch Foundation Alumni Association (2011).