FORMER U.S president Donald J. Trump has hired a high-profile lawyer to help him with the aftermath of the F.B.I. search of his club and home in Florida and the criminal investigation into his handling of sensitive government documents.

The lawyer, Christopher M. Kise, is a former solicitor general for the State of Florida who has won four cases before the United States Supreme Court and worked as a transition adviser for Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican.

Kise, who is now in private practice, formally joined the team in recent days, according to two of Trump’s associates. His hiring was earlier reported by NBC News.

Kise is joining a team that a number of other high-profile lawyers have steered clear of, concerned about Trump’s history of nonpayment or his insistence on trying to run his own legal efforts.

His hiring had been in the works for several weeks since the August 8 search, according to two people close to Trump.

Kise will join two lawyers who are not licensed in Florida — James Trusty and M. Evan Corcoran — on the case, which is related to the handling of hundreds of pages of government documents, many marked as highly classified. Trump had been keeping the documents at his members-only club and home in Florida, Mar-a-Lago, since he left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, at the end of his term.

Trusty and Corcoran are both former federal prosecutors; Trusty has experience prosecuting organised crime. The closest thing to a quarterback of the legal team is Boris Epshteyn, a onetime lawyer at the firm Milbank who became active in politics and worked on both of Trump’s campaigns, and who has championed Trump’s claims, debunked in dozens of lawsuits, that the election was stolen from him.