Beth Ann Wilkinson was a star partner in the big Washington office of Latham & Watkins in 2006, when she took a gamble and joined Fannie Mae as general counsel. At the time, the mortgage company was trying to dig itself out of an $11 billion accounting scandal.

At the time, Ms. Wilkinson knew nothing about the mortgage-backed securities at the core of Fannie Mae's business.

"I think they were looking for someone who was willing to exercise their judgment and have a good relationship with the regulators," she said then. "And hopefully have a little more humble attitude about the company and its place."

But the effort to turn around Fannie has taken a radical, indeed humbling turn: The federal government has seized control of the company and its sibling, Freddie Mac.

It is unclear whether Wilkinson will remain with Fannie, or perhaps return to Latham, where she was co-chair of the firm's white-collar and government investigations practice.

If she stays, there will be plenty of challenges.

The government bailout will result in huge losses for the shareholders of both Fannie and Freddie, and class-action lawyers are already preparing litigation.

"We have already been contacted over the last few weeks by several pension fund clients asking us to advise them with respect to their rights vis-à-vis these two companies," says Jerry Silk of Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman in New York.

Silk, for one, says one order of business for Fannie's managers would be to release the findings of Morgan Stanley, which was hired by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to look at the books of the two companies before the takeover.

With lawyers like Silk contemplating lawsuits, Wilkinson's vast experience as a trial lawyer should come in handy.

In one of her last cases before joining Fannie, she won a jury trial on behalf of Philip Morris in a product-liability case in a Los Angeles superior court that is on the "judicial hellhole" list of the American Tort Reform Association.

But the restoration of confidence may be more important, at this moment, than the litigation dance, and Wilkinson is, according to one former colleague, uniquely talented.

"She is one of the few people who has got the whole package," says Leslie Caldwell, a partner with the New York office of Morgan Lewis, who headed up the Justice Department's Enron Task Force. Caldwell and Wilkinson were assistant federal prosecutors together in Brooklyn in the early 1990s. "She's polished, she's smooth, very smart. She's self-deprecating but very confident." Caldwell added that while some inspire confidence but don't deliver, Wilkinson is the real deal. "She conveys a real safe-hand persona," Caldwell says.

A self-professed military brat—her father is a retired Navy submarine captain—Wilkinson's first job out of the University of Virginia School of Law in 1987 was with the office of the Army's general counsel, where she participated in the prosecution of a Colombian drug lord for bombing a civilian airliner.

Before joining Latham, she was a principle deputy in the Justice Department's Terrorism and Violent Crime Section, where she participated in the trial of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, plotters of the Oklahoma City bombing.

In 2000, she married television reporter David Gregory, who is taking over as anchor of MSNBC's election coverage, ousting Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann.

Calls to Fannie Mae were not returned. Several lawyers, inside the Beltway and out, believe her continued presence would help Fannie Mae regain credibility.

Earlier this year, Wilkinson was on the other side of the negotiating table from James B. Lockhart III, director of the newly formed Federal Housing Finance Agency, when Fannie and Freddie sat down to negotiate the settlement of a long-running investigation by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

In March, Cuomo announced a settlement in which Fannie and Freddie, as participants in the secondary market for mortgages, agreed to buy only loans from banks that meet standards to ensure that the appraisals underlying them are independent and reliable.

"She's very smart and she's very tough," says William McLucas, chair of the securities department at Wilmer Hale, a former head of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission who has been hired to dig into scandals at Enron, WorldCom, and UnitedHealth Group. "She's got good judgment, she's tough, and she calls it down the middle."