(Reuters) - Five years ago, Perkins Coie had just over 20 attorneys in its political law group, which advises on issues like campaign finance and election litigation. It now lists 65 lawyers in the group – and they could play a key role in the outcome of the 2020 U.S. election.

In recent decades the Seattle-founded firm, once best known for representing tech companies in the Pacific Northwest, has established itself as a key player on the national political scene, with the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic Party groups and candidates as core clients.

The leader of its political law group, Marc Elias, has become a quasi-celebrity among Democrats, with more than 180,000 Twitter followers. This election cycle, he has represented Democrats in litigation over voting rights in more than two dozen states, notching a number of successes.

He and his team are also likely to play a big role in litigation unfolding after the election, which remained too close to call on Wednesday afternoon.

President Donald Trump's re-election campaign said Wednesday that it has already filed a lawsuit to stop the counting of ballots in Michigan, a swing state. The campaign is also demanding a recount in Wisconsin, another key state, and said it will intervene in vote-count litigation in Pennsylvania.

As the uncertainties continued in those states and others on Wednesday, Elias was "in a work bunker" and unable to comment on the latest litigation or the firm's practice, a Perkins Coie representative said.

Elias has previously touted the expansion of his political law group, noting in a Perkins Coie video promoting the practice that it has "grown as politics have grown."

"As you've seen the size of campaigns and the length of campaigns get ever bigger and bigger, the political law practice has grown along with it," he said, adding the expansion has also led to more specialization among lawyers on the team; most used to be political law generalists.

Bob Bauer, presidential candidate Joe Biden's legal adviser, founded Perkins Coie's political law practice in 1980. At that time, the political process was facing increased scrutiny in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

Bauer, who served as White House counsel under the Obama administration and counsel to the Senate minority leader during the impeachment trial of Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1999, left Perkins Coie in 2018. But his former firm's ties to the Clinton's party have only grown deeper.

In the 2020 election cycle, Perkins Coie has been paid more than $49 million from political groups, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets website, which tracks money in politics and campaign finance records. Most, if not all, of those payouts are from Democrats or groups with ties to Democrat causes.

The firm hadn't received any payments through the end of August directly from the Biden campaign, which has tapped Covington & Burling as its outside counsel firm, federal election data shows.

Perkins Coie's political work has also sometimes forced it to play defense, as when former Trump adviser Carter Page sued the firm, Elias and the DNC for defamation, claiming they paid for opposition research on Page and the 2016 Trump campaign and then publicized false information. Lawyers for Elias and the firm have argued, in at least one case, that Page failed to plausibly allege defamation.

The firm as a whole has grown alongside its political law team. Perkins Coie in 2015 had about 938 full-time lawyers and annual revenue of about $748 million, according to legal industry publication The American Lawyer. It now has more than 1,100 lawyers, with 2019 revenues nearing $935 million.