Episcopal Presiding Bishop hires litigator as her "special counsel" before heading off to Primates Meeting in Egypt

Ah, so while 815 cuts the MDG Goals out of the national budget and the primates meeting is underway in Egypt, Bishop Schori hires a personal litigator to help out with the mounting Episcopal Church lawsuits, apparently with a special eye on Virginia. As we all ready know, The Episcopal Church ignored calls for a cease-fire of litigation by filing an appeal of Judge Bellows' rulings before the Virginia Supreme Court today.

815 reports:

Mary E. Kostel has been named special counsel to the Presiding Bishop for property litigation and discipline, according to an announcement by the Rev. Canon Charles Robertson of the Presiding Bishop's office.

Kostel, who is also chancellor of the Diocese of Washington, has worked in similar areas of law in private practice. She has been associated with the law firms of Shea & Gardner (now Goodwin Procter) and Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. She was previously a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Division.

She is a graduate of Princeton University and the law school of the University of Virginia, where she was editor-in-chief of the Virginia Law Review. After graduation, she served as a clerk for the U.S. District Court in Alabama, and for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Kostel is married to law school classmate Gregory DiMeglio. They live in Arlington, Virginia, with their sons, Alexander and Philip, and are members of St. Alban's Church in Washington, D.C.

Her profile has now disappeared off the Goodwin Procter website, though is still available in the Google Cache (and we note that she is a member of the Washington and Virginia Bars only, so we can guess what she's going to be up to). There's more info on the PB's new special counsel from what was once on the Goodwin Proctor website (home of You Know Who):

Mary Kostel, of counsel in the firm's Litigation Department, concentrates her practice primarily on civil litigation involving issues of products liability and toxic torts ... Ms. Kostel was an attorney at Shea & Gardner prior to its combination with Goodwin Procter in 2004. Previous to joining Shea & Gardner, Ms. Kostel was in the Communications and Electronic Commerce group at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, where she represented a variety of clients in federal court as well as before the Federal Communications Commission and several state public utility commissions. Before that, Ms. Kostel was a Trial Attorney in the Federal Programs Branch of the Civil Division at the U.S. Department of Justice, where she defended federal statutes against constitutional challenges, advocated federal agencies’ construction and application of complex statutory and regulatory schemes, and represented federal agencies in employment discrimination actions.

Upon graduation from law school, Ms. Kostel clerked for the Honorable Sam C. Pointer, Jr., of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Alabama, and the Honorable James R. Browning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ... At the University of Virginia School of Law, Ms. Kostel received the school’s Margaret G. Hyde award.

There's more on her activities as Bishop John Chane's chancellor in a puffy piece here.

Tip of the Tinfoil from GR.