So let’s say you’re one of those college juniors or seniors who’s known since diaperdom that you wanted to be a lawyer. Not just any lawyer, a big firm lawyer. And let’s also say you’ve got stellar grades from a top school and that you missed all of one question on the LSAT. And now you’re faced with this conundrum: Where should you go to law school? Harvard? Yale? Stanford?

Not so fast there, High Achiever. According to this report out today in the National Law Journal, your choice should be Columbia or Northwestern. Columbia Law School landed in the No. 1 spot again as the school that sent the greatest portion of graduates to NLJ 250 law firms, with nearly 75 percent of its students in 2007 taking jobs among the nation’s largest law firms. Northwestern finished in the No. 2 spot, with some 73.5 percent of its graduates accepting slots at NLJ 250 firms. Boston College Law School rounded out the list of the top 20 go-to law schools, with 36.8 percent of its 261 juris doctor grads heading for full-time jobs at NLJ 250 law firms.

The big movers this year: Northwestern, which moved to No. 2 from No. 11; Southern Cal., which moved from No. 20 to No. 14. New to the list: UCLA (No. 17) and Boston University (No. 18). Heading in the other direction were University of Texas and Fordham, both of which fell off the list.

The secret sauce behind Northwestern’s success? It could be that the school has also focused on enrolling students with significant postgraduate work experience, says dean David Van Zandt. And the school has worked to accept students in recent years from geographically diverse areas, with an emphasis on those from the Northeast, which has helped to boost recruiting from NLJ 250 firms, he said. Michael Schill, the UCLA law school dean, also attributed his school’s popularity among NLJ 250 firms to an increased effort to geographically diversify the student body. Said Schill: “We’re being more aggressive.”

We’ve written lately about the resiliency of the market for lateral partners. What about for lateral associates?

We asked some recruiters. The report is not good.



Alan Rubenstein of Chicago Legal Search called out real-estate associates for living in a particularly grim predicament right now. “Across the board concern is being expressed by real estate associates about just how much they’ve slowed down and whether they’re going to be able to be even come close to making hours,” he says, “and whether there will be layoffs as a result of that.”

As for corporate, he says “We’re still getting some searches. It’s softened significnatly from how active it was in spring of last year.”

As predicted by Hildebrandt International and Dan DiPietro over at Citi Private Bank, litigation and bankruptcy aren’t making up for the lull on the transactional side.

There’s a “modest pickup,” Rubenstein says. “Probably not to the degree that one might expect given that those areas tend to run countercyclical.”

Cynthia Sitcov in D.C. dialed in a similar report. “We don’t see a lot of lateral hiring right now for associates.” Bankruptcy? “We’re not seeing it.”

There are anomalies, including demand for hard-core IP – the patent jobs for the engineering types, she says. Sitcov does have a search open for a real-estate associate to work with a D.C.-based partner with a national practice. She thought it would be easy to fill, but so far some potential hires have been reluctant to jump.

“We’ve been really stunned,” Sitcov says. “I wonder if the market is changing in some fundamental way?” Maybe it’s the uncertainty, she surmises. “People do not want to pick up and move on the associate level right now.”

LB’ers: You’re on the ground, in the firms. What’s the prognosis?

Photo: iStockPhoto

This being Masters week, let’s close it out with a feel-good golf post.

Journal reporter Katie Rosman recently contributed to this Web site’s new sports page (forgive the plug but really, check it out) with a dispatch about an inhouse lawyer who started a drive to get golf equipment to boys in Uganda.

Daniel Frommer (pictured right) is a 36-year-old lawyer for the Walt Disney Internet Group in California. Earlier this year, his longtime friend Clare Murumba (pictured center), also a lawyer, urged him to visit Uganda, her native country, to which she had recently moved from New York. They talked golf — the country has many courses built during the British administration from 1894 to 1962. Ms. Murumba also told Mr. Frommer that many boys there love golf but have almost no access to clubs and balls.

Mr. Frommer set out to do what he could to rectify that. Exactly what — read on here, complete with some great pictures.

Meanwhile, for the golfers out there, here’s a must-read from the archives by Rosman — the tale of how she secured a chance for her stepfather to play at the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters tournament.

Enjoy the Masters and have a great weekend!

A recent Journal article about the gender wars noted a widely quoted statistic: At U.S. law firms, women account for less than 20% of partners in 2006, even though women received nearly half of law degrees granted in 2006 and 44% in 1996.

Somewhere along the way there’s a big dropoff. And women aren’t the only ones leaving big law firms. As law blog colleague Ashby Jones wrote a couple of years ago, more than 30 percent of associates leave by the end of their third year as well.

We spoke recently with a couple of big-firm lawyers who’ve been thinking a lot about these issues.

Over at WilmerHale, co-managing partner Bill Perlstein says law firms need to step back and consider whether the traditional associate/counsel/partner model is working. “We’re in a talent business,” he says. Attrition represents “a massive loss of talent.”

Earlier this year, his firm started a task force to look at whether there are ways to structure a law firm to better the odds of keeping talent, of both genders.
“There are many people who want top-tier work but don’t know that they want 24/7 and that this is what they view as the sole focus of their lives.”

The task force, he says, aims to explore whether there’s a way to expand the number of work options and career paths to keep people who might not want the all-out commitment of partnership. “The one brass ring may not work anymore,” he says.

Among the issues the task force may consider: extending the partnership track in some instances to accommodate people who need to scale back their commitment for certain periods in their lives; ways to keep people who are at home for a time better-connected to the firm; and ways to enable less-than-full-timers to get “top-tier” work. At the same time, said Perlstein, a firm needs to take into account the needs of clients and reward the people who are “driven to work all out.”

Meanwhile, at Cleary Gottleib, the firm in the U.S. recently instituted a few changes to better address, in particular, the way “younger lawyers are approaching their careers,” says James Bromley, a restructuring lawyer who chairs the firm’s associates committee. Some changes are granular. For example, the firm has formalized that telecommuting without special permission is okay one day a month in a lawyer’s first year, and two days a month after that. “There’s the opportunity for more comprehensive flextime” but that requires an application and review process, Bromley says.

Other changes are designed to address a broader shift in big-law culture, says Bromley. More associates “don’t know that they want to be partners at law firms,” he says. “We have to respond to that.” To this end, lawyers who want a reduced schedule can now go down to 60%, when the standard had been 80% — and that’s not just for parents.

The goal isn’t just to accommodate short-term needs. Rather, it’s to give associates “the opportunity during the course of their careers if they think they need it to have a safe place to think about their long-term aspirations.” He adds “We want to make sure that the law-firm environment is not an environment to make an ‘either I’m a lawyer at a big firm or I’m not’ choice.”

The traditional law firm model was “sort of an onramp to a highway that had a single off ramp after eight years” says Bromley. “For loads of different reasons people these days are looking for the opportunity to make sure that they want to make that deicison and sometimes make the deicsion to leave and sometimes make the decision to leave and come back.”

LB’ers, do these guys have the right answers? We know lots of other firms have given thought to these issues. Anyone out there doing anything particularly innovative?

Photo: iStockphoto

Back in February, we noted that a group of non-indicted Duke University lacrosse players had sued Duke, Durham and several school and police officials in federal court in North Carolina for fraud, abuse and breach of duty for supporting the prosecution of the case against their three falsely-accused teammates. (Click here for the complaint, in which they seek damages for invasion of privacy, emotional distress and other injuries.) At the time, Duke’s GC, Pamela Bernard, said: “Their legal strategy — attacking Duke — is misdirected and without merit.”

Now that strategy, which includes a Web site, dukelawsuit.com, has itself become the subject of a dispute between the players and the University, the city of Durham and the Duke University Health System, which have objected in federal court to the site — a blog that tracks the suit and includes links to all the filings. Here’s the NLJ story.

The defense lawyers, according to the report, say the site violates rules of the North Carolina Professional Conduct and is likely to prejudice proceedings. In court papers, the lawyers said the site “is aimed at attacking the character, credibility, and reputation of the Duke Defendants.”

Lawyers for the 38 Duke lax players, led by Chuck Cooper, of D.C.’s Cooper & Kirk, filed an opposing brief, saying the rule doesn’t apply to civil cases and that most of the information on the site is available through public records. They said the city officials’ attempt to silence the players “gives a new meaning to the concept of gall,” and pointed out that city officials fueled negative publicity about the players when the case surfaced in 2006.

Reginald B. Gillespie, of Durham’s Faison & Gillespie, who is representing Durham in the suit, told the NLJ he doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

LB readers, what do you think of the Duke plaintiffs’ Web site? Is there anything unethical or, short of that, unseemly, about it? Or are the defendants making a mountain out of a molehill?

Sean and Robin back together! Toni Braxton hospitalized! Joan Jett keeps sexual orientation a mystery! Katie Holmes gets a new haircut!



What with Gitmo, Yoo and The Donald, it’s been a rather heavy Wednesday at LB Headquarters. So, as we turn the corner on the work week, let’s end the day in the gossip-blog realm: Perez Hilton (pictured) yesterday filed a lawsuit against a fellow celebrity gossip blogger for libel, slander, invasion of privacy and harassment. OMG!

The complaint, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleges that Jonathan Wayne Lewandowski, a/k/a/ Jonathan Jaxson, a Florida blogger, slandered Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, by claiming Hilton solicited sexual favors from Jaxson in exchange for help promoting Jaxson’s nascent web site, entitled J&J’s Dirt.

The suit refers to February 28 article in the NY Post’s Page Six, in which Jaxson — a former publicist for the Backstreet Boys — told the Post that Hilton encouraged him to send sex tapes of himself. “He would tell me he would give me stories for my blog,” Jaxson told the Post. “He used me.” Also contributing to Hilton’s unhappiness: Jaxson published Hilton’s cell-phone number on his blog.

For those LB’ers unfamiliar with the Hilton brand, the lawsuit describes it thusly: “[Hilton] is a world-renowned Internet celebrity gossip ‘blogger’ . . . . Celebrities are the focus of his blog, and when the sometimes newsworthy events of their lives unfold, the content of his site transforms gossip into journalism.”

Hilton claims he’s “suffered loss of his reputation, shame and mortification” and “mental anguish.” The suit doesn’t specify monetary damages, but seeks general, special, and punitive damages, and legal fees. Jaxson told the Smoking Gun that, while he’d yet to see the complaint, he found it “hilarious” that Hilton was suing him. “I have not lied about him. What Perez did to me was hurtful.”

In other Perez Hilton news, the Journal reported today that, beginning next month, Hilton, whose blog reportedly gets 2.8 million visitors per month, will have his own twice-daily radio show. The radio show, according to this WSJ report, is part of a strategy that includes more television appearances; the release this summer of a feature movie, “Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild,” in which Hilton stars as himself; a coming book; and a possible development deal with Warner Bros. Records.

Meanwhile, loyal LB readers might recall this piece by LB alum Peter Lattman about gossip sites and pubs firing back at celebrities and their lawyers who sue them.

Dear Professor Yoo:
I write to invite you to appear before the Committee on the Judiciary at our May 6 hearing scheduled to explore issues regarding the nature and scope of Presidential power in the time of war . . . . Should you continue to refuse to testify on a cooperative basis, however, the Committee must of course proceed with its investigation and will be left with no option but to compel your appearance. — From an April 8 letter from John Conyers Jr. to John Yoo



Last week the Bush administration declassified an 81-page memo from 2003, in which John Yoo, then the deputy assistant AG in the DOJ’s Office of the Legal Counsel, concludes that even if techniques are found to be in violation of U.S. and international laws against torture, “necessity or self-defense could provide justifications for any criminal liability.”

One week later, Detroit Democrat Conyers, on behalf of the House’s judiciary committee, requested in the April 8 letter that Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, “voluntarily” appear before the Committee on the Judiciary. Just in case Yoo has other plans on May 6, the letter adds:

I understand that, in discussions with my staff, you have expressed a reluctance to testify voluntarily on such matters. I am hopeful that you have reconsidered that stance, however, given your extensive public comments on these very issues. For example, on April 3, 2008, Esquire magazine published an interview in which you made frank and on-the-record comments regarding the origination, drafting, and scope of [Office of Legal Counsel] interrogation memoranda. Similarly, you provided on-the-record comments on the recently released March 2003 interrogation memorandum to the Washington Post just last week, describing that document as “near boilerplate” and asserting that, in pulling back from the analysis in the memorandum, the Department had “ignored [its] long tradition in defending the President’s authority in wartime.

Click here for the full text of the letter.

The Law Blog missed out on a couple of crazy legal stories of late. Here are two law-of-the-weird items to consume with your coffee and scone.



Stripping Ruled Form of Expression: A state judge in Texas ruled that the state’s $5 “Pole Tax” — a fee that strip clubs collected from patrons and donated to sexual assault-prevention programs and health care for the uninsured — was unconstitutional. The judge ruled that the law singled “out business activity involving expression that, while politically unpopular, is nevertheless protected by the First Amendment.” According to the judge: “There is no evidence that combining alcohol with nude erotic dancing causes dancers to be uninsured, that any dancer is in fact uninsured, or that any uninsured dancer could qualify for assistance.” Here’s a report from FindLaw.

Peter Nolan and Stewart Whitehead, of Winstead PC, represented the strip clubs. James Todd and Mishell Neeland represented the government.



Professor Supplements Salary: In what a German judge called “a very severe case of corruption,” an unidentified professor at Hannover University (pictured) was found to have received kickback payments from his advisees.

Judge Peter Peschka sentenced the professor to three years in prison for accepting $240,000 to serve as a faculty adviser to 68 doctorate students between 1998 and 2005. According to this AP report, court documents say an agency brokered kickback deals for him to serve as the students’ adviser. From the Perhaps-He-Should-Have-Hired-a-PR-Guy Department: The professor reportedly said he needed the money to renovate his Hamburg mansion.

Photo: Associated Press


These days, unemployed slugger Barry Bonds doesn’t have to worry about not getting pitched to or tracking down line drives to the gap (or, for that matter, wins and losses of the woeful Giants). But he might have to start worrying about these nagging perjury charges.

In what’s being billed as a boost to prosecutors in the Bonds case, a federal jury on Friday convicted former world class cyclist Tammy Thomas (pictured) of perjury and obstructing justice for lying to a grand jury during the BALCO steroids probe. Bonds has been indicted on similar charges. He has pleaded not guilty.

According to the account in the Marin (Calif.) Independent Journal, the Thomas and Bonds cases have many differences in terms of evidence and witnesses, but contain many of the same themes.

After more than a day of deliberations, the jury found Thomas, 38, guilty on three counts of making false statements to a federal grand jury in November 2003. Thomas was reportedly stoic as the jury’s verdict was read, but then lost it. According to the Independent Journal, she leapt to her feet as the jurors left the courtroom and began shouting at them: “Look me in the eye, look me in the eye. Look me in the eye and tell me you mean what you did. Look me in the eye. You can’t do it.”

Thomas also reportedly confronted the BALCO prosecution team as they left court, gesturing and shouting at lead prosecutor Matt Parrella. “Look me in the eye. You like to destroy lives,” she yelled at Parrella, who was pulled from the scene by fellow prosecutor Jeff Nedrow.

Thomas faces a sentence likely to range from one to three years in federal prison for the perjury and obstruction convictions. Sentencing is set for July 18.

The Law Blog tries to avoid starting posts with lots of confusing numbers and other such gobbledy****, but we think this is an interesting stat: From 2003 through March 31, 2007, 18,075 consumers’ arbitrations in California were resolved through hearings conducted by the National Arbitration Forum, according to the NAF’s own data. But only thirty of the matters, or fewer than 0.2%, were won by consumers.

Apparently due in part to that statistic, the NAF, an arbitration organization that helps resolve disputes between credit-card companies and their customers, has been accused of favoring lenders in a lawsuit filed last month by the San Francisco city attorney. (Here’s the WSJ report, from LB colleague Nathan Koppel.) The suit alleges that in specific cases NAF approved an inflated award, improperly imposed attorneys fees and didn’t respond to a consumer’s request to appear at an arbitration, among other things. Also named as defendants in the suit: FIA Card Services NA, a Delaware bank that issues credit cards, and a California debt collector.

“NAF is actually in the business of…churning out arbitration awards in favor of debt collectors,” reads the suit, which is filed on behalf of the “people of California” and seeks $2,500 for each unfair and deceptive act committed.

In a statement, NAF said: “The National Arbitration Forum’s independent case administration and neutral decision makers constitute a system that satisfies or exceeds objective standards of fairness. Our arbitration program has been supported in all courts in which it has been reviewed.”

The allegations in the San Francisco suit give fodder to those plaintiffs lawyers and consumer advocates who argue that consumers are often forced into arbitration without adequately consenting, and that their recoveries can pale in comparison to jury verdicts at trial.

Here at the Law Blog we wish everyone could skate into the two-day break feeling like a winner. But, alas, some legal eagles will soar, and some will fall. In the first of what we hope to make a weekly item, here’s an LB round-up of this week’s victories and defeats.

First, the “Hits”:



A Patent Party: See any patent partners chugging beers in the hallway on Wednesday? Because of a ruling in Tafas v. Dudas, they’re now free to file long, complicated patent applications. A court shot down a PTO rule that attempted to streamline applications by limiting the number of claims to 25. Patent associates, for whom this might mean more late nights at the office, can thank the winning attorneys in the case, K&E’s Daniel Sean Trainor and Elizabeth Locke; and Kelley Drye’s William Golden, Steven Moore and James Nealon.

Happy Birthday Mr. Paparazzi: The families of photographers who documented the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe scored a big win when an L.A. district judge ruled that Monroe was a New Yorker, not a Californian, when she died, meaning her estate holds no right of publicity. The lawyer for the photographers’ families, Surjit Soni, said that if the estate can no longer extract a licensing fee, “you will see a great deal more Marilyn-related products, and they will be lower in price”?

A Big Man Admits His Mistake: Marvin Arrington, a Georgia judge, felt so bad about kicking white lawyers out of his courtroom so he could lecture a group of primarily black defendants, that he went on CNN Tuesday night to explain and apologize. “I didnt want them to think I was talking down to them; trying to embarrass them or insult them . . . .” said Arrington.

And now, the “Whiffs”:



That’s Not Funny: From the “Keep It To Yourself Next Time Department,” David Lamos, while representing death row inmate J.B. “Pig” Parker, faxed a fake motion to the prosecutor in 1999. The purported motion, which Lamos called a “jest” when he testified last month in Parker’s post-conviction case, was written in “ebonics,” according to experts, and is now being used against Lamos to argue that his representation of Lamos was ineffective. “If you look at the content of it,” Lamos told the Law Blog, “it is ridiculously funny”?

Ouch! Dean Makau Mutua and his Buffalo law school took a serious blow in the recently-released U.S. News & World Report rankings, dropping from 77 to 100. Dean Mutua provided the Law Blog with a spirited critique of the rankings (and a defense of his school), but, he conceded, no one is “denying the impact” of the school’s fall-off in the rankings. “Parents and prospective students look at them as one of the measures of desirability for a law school,” Dean Mutua said. “That’s just the nature of the place these rankings play in the marketplace.”

50 Million? That’s how many unhappy “light” cigarette smokers there were yesterday. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals decertified a class in a lawsuit alleging that tobacco makers deceived them into believing that light cigarettes were healthier than regular, full-flavored smokes. The plaintiffs’ damages request of $800 billion was based largely on economic grounds: that the deception caused the plaintiffs to buy cigarettes that weren’t worth their price. The defeated lawyer: Michael Hausfeld, of the firm Cohen Milstein.

LB’ers: That’s how our scorecard shakes out for the week — now’s your turn to weigh in. Please call out some cases, and their counsel. (Keep it civil, folks!) And have a good weekend!

In yesterday's discussion of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, we received an interesting comment from an LB reader. The person wrote:

I would like an explanation from the U.S. News as to why they dropped Buffalo 23 spots (77 to 100). That seriously damages the marketability of my degree and I feel like I've been punched in the gut.
I don't know if it's the economic depression of Western NY, the school's refusal to rank/calculate GPA, or our poor (relative) bar passage rate, all of which are fair criticisms, but I'd like to get it straight from U.S. News. If they sent an e-mail to the students, I think we would take it as constructive criticism. As of now I, at least (and I think many others) just hate them.



Indeed, in the op-ed we blogged yesterday, the author, Michael Seringhaus, a Yale One L who criticized the rankings, mentioned that Buffalo's interim dean, Makau Mutua (pictured), sent an e-mail to Buffalo students (which appeared on Above the Law) promising to rectify the situation as quickly as possible. “My goal is to get this law school into the top 50,” wrote Dean Mutua, a Harvard law grad who’s been a visiting prof at, among other law schools, Harvard and Iowa.

So the Law Blog lobbed a call to Dean Mutua to talk about the rankings.

Hi Dean. Thanks for chatting. Your school took a big hit in the U.S. News & World Report rankings this year. What happened?

I think one change in how they calibrate the rankings put us in a difficult position. Now, when they count who is and isn't employed nine months out, they're counting the people who are not looking for jobs. Even if that's only five or six people, it can make a big difference. The other thing that was strange was that our reputation among lawyers and judges, which accounts for 15% of the overall ranking, dropped from 2.8 to 2.4, which means we dropped from 86 to 125 in that ranking category.

Why the reputation fall-off?

Well, we're the same people we were last year. There was no dramatic change in the reputation of our faculty. I think it's a manifestation, clearly, of who voted. Our understanding is that very few people voted. So a very important index is premised on the votes of very few people.

What else happend from last year to this year? One person who commented on the Law Blog mentioned an economic depression in Western New York.

Yes, the depression affects giving by alumni. Resources only account for 15% of the overall U.S. News ranking, but it also affects other ranking categories, like placement success, which accounts for 20%, because you can't spend on your career services office; and student selectivity, which accounts for 25% of the ranking, because you can't give scholarships. So in the placement success category, we dropped from 44 to 102. That's huge.

So what do you think of the rankings?

The rankings methodology is deeply flawed and silly. It seems to measure the amount of money a law school can spend. We all know that resources do not necessarily correspond to the quality of legal education.

But, like them or not, they matter, right?

Yes. Having said that, I do not think any of us are denying the impact of these rankings. Parents and prospective students look at them as one of the measures of desirability for a law school. That's just the nature of the place these rankings play in the marketplace. I understand why students and alumni are concerned about the rankings. Until there's a better way, we're stuck with this methodology and this particular outcome.

How important is money to a school's ability to provide a good education?

Funding is an important part of what allows us to provide students with a good education. You have to be able to offer scholarships to students and have a law school building that's conducive to learning and technology. To do those things, yes, you need resources. There are issues for which the law school needs to progress, and one of those is expanding the resource base.

So how do you do it?

There are three places to get funding: alumni, the central university (if you're part of a research university system), and the state (for schools like us). In our case, we're the only state law school in New York State, and we feel strongly that it'd be helpful if the state government and state assembly were to provide us - since we, for the most part, educate the citizens of New York State - with more support. The drop in rankings should signal to the state and alumni that more support is needed.

Back to the rankings for a minute. Yesterday, a One L at Yale argued that funding shouldn't be such a big part of the rankings because big schools, like Harvard and Yale, will always have more money than everyone else.

I don't think fundraising ought to be the place to compete for legal education. If it's going to be a contest between law schools, it should be about who can prepare citizens to become good lawyers and to support the democracy that we live in. I've taught at Harvard and Iowa, and I can tell you that at Buffalo we have fine students. My faculty here stimulates me. It's a false metric to use dollars as a proxy for excellence, because Harvard and Yale will always come out on top. And that's one argument for just dropping the U.S. News rankings, because they measure resource allocation. I do agree that sometimes there's a connection [between money and quality of education], especially when you start talking about attracting star faculty. The disparities are huge between professors at public and private schools - sometimes on the order of 100%.

Can you give us a ballpark?

It could be $120,000 for a public school professor versus an average of $180,000 or $200,000 at private schools. Those disparities aren't small. So to the extent people can be induced by pay, you create a feeding frenzy among academics.

So if the Law Blog wrote you a check for, say, $50 million, how would you spend it, aside from increasing professors' salaries?

First, I would offer part of that support to students who are well qualified but can't afford to go to law school - excellent minds with access issues. I'd use it to recruit law faculty. And I would establish chairs, which are important for faculty, for when they reach a certain level of excellence. The money would be used for all those purposes, but that's only to trigger academic excellence.

If money and resources don't always equate with academic excellence, what indicia should be used?

It's a mistake to subject oneself to the cruelty of U.S. news rankings. But there are some indicia that one can address, such as LSAT scores and the reputation of the school with academics and judges. One can address, I suppose, questions of placement success. Some of these indicia can be addressed, and they're important. But when one starts measuring the amount of expenditure per student, that's not important as a marker.

Law Blog colleague Amir Efrati flew all the way to New Orleans yesterday to cover the appellate argument over Jeff Skilling’s conviction. From the early report, sounds like poor Amir got a raw deal — the argument was a bit of a snoozer. (Hope you at least got some good etouffee, buddy!)

The lowdown: According to the report, the judges on the panel stayed largely silent during oral arguments, giving little indication of their thinking on the case. Too bad. We’d hoped to hear tales of riveting debate over the brief recently submitted by the defense arguing the government had withheld crucial evidence from the defense. No dice. The judges scarcely discussed that evidence.

The focus of Wednesday’s hearing was a federal fraud statute which aims to punish an employee who deprives his employer of “honest services.” Shortly after Skilling was convicted in the spring of 2006, the Fifth Circuit overturned several convictions based on the honest-services theory. In the so-called “Nigerian Barge” case, brought against several former executives at Enron and Merrill Lynch for making a deal that allegedly fraudulently boosted Enron’s earnings, the court said the honest-services theory couldn’t be used to prosecute an employee whose fraudulent acts were intended to benefit corporate interests, such as meeting earnings targets, rather than their own. (Some of the defendants are facing a retrial.)
At the hearing Wednesday, the judges let Skilling’s lawyer, Dan Petrocelli, and the government’s lawyer, Douglas Wilson, argue why that ruling should or shouldn’t apply to Mr. Skilling’s case.

So does Skilling have a chance? Yes, at least according to this Houston Chronicle article. Referring to the Nigerian Barge decision, which called into question lower court judge Sim Lake’s handling of the “honest services” issue, White-Collar Crime Prof Blog author Peter Henning told the Chron: “It’s like dropping a rock in a pond and what the ripple effect will be. He’s got the error. Now it’s just how far he runs with it.”

In 2005, Massachusetts state court judge Ernest Murphy (pictured) won a $2.1 million libel verdict against the Boston Herald for a series criticizing his alleged lenient sentencing practices. Murphy sued over stories quoting “several courthouse sources” that allegedly heard Murphy say a teenage rape victim should “get over it.” Here’s the story, from the NLJ.

But after the original verdict, the Herald’s publisher, Patrick Purcell, received two letters from Murphy, written on the court’s letterhead, demanding payment of $3.26 million and telling Purcell that the Herald had little chance of winning on appeal. Murphy’s first letter warned Purcell that it would be a “mistake. In fact, a BIG mistake” to show the letter to anyone except “the gentleman whose authorized signature will be affixed to the check in question.” Murphy’s second letter said Purcell had “ZERO” chance of winning an appeal.

The Herald wound up paying Murphy $3.4 million including interest after Murphy won an appeal in May 2007.

Still, as it turns out, the sending of the letters just might catch up with Judge Murphy. The Massachusetts Commission on Judicial Conduct recommended a $25,000 fine, a 30-day suspension without pay and a public censure for Judge Murphy for sending the letters. The commission made its recommendations to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which makes final rulings on judicial disciplinary cases.

The commission concluded that Murphy’s conduct was willful and that he attempted to both intimidate Purcell and persuade the Herald to pay him more than the courts had awarded him at that point in the case.

When oral arguments are heard Wednesday in Jeff Skilling’s appeal, the former Enron chief will be represented by the same lawyer who handled his trial, O’Melveny & Myers’s Dan Petrocelli (pictured, right).

It’s a bit of an unusual move. Lawyers say that a decade ago, it was more common for a high-profile defendant to use his trial lawyer to handle an appeal. But now more and more well-heeled white-collar defendants hire appellate specialists. “The audiences are very different,” says Latham’s Maureen Mahoney. “The goal of a trial lawyer is to advance broad themes to a jury. Appellate lawyers have to identify the legal issues that are going to resonate with appellate judges.”

Furthermore, says Mahoney, lawyers who join a case post-conviction often view it with a fresh set of eyes, much the way the appellate judges do.

Petrocelli apparently did get some help in the briefing from an appellate lawyer at his firm, Walter Dellinger (Click here for the mammoth brief.) And lawyers said that with a case as complex as Skilling’s, the arrangement makes some sense. “It’s a very complicated case and Dan knows it better than anyone,” says Larry Robbins, who successfully handled the appeal for one of the defendants in the so-called Enron Nigerian Barge case. “He’s an extremely highly regarded lawyer. I would have been surprised had Skilling chosen someone else.”

Billed as the first public gathering of two of the most prominent Watergate defendants, Egil “Bud” Krogh and John Dean will take the stage tomorrow at University of St. Thomas law school to participate in a forum called “Watergate Revisited: The Ethics of the Lawyers.” They will be joined by the two lawyers who prosecuted Watergate — Charles Breyer, the brother of high court justice Stephen and now a district court judge, and Jill Wine-Banks.

Dean – who was President Nixon’s counsel before pleading guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice – is now a visiting scholar at USC and a columnist for FindLaw.com.

Krogh, appointed at the ripe age of 29 to be the staff assistant to the President’s counsel, co-directed the Plumbers unit, which in turn ordered the break-in into the office of the psychiatrist for Daniel Ellsberg, of Pentagon Papers fame. Krogh (Principia College, University of Washington law) pleaded guilty to a charge of deprivation of civil rights and served four months in prison. After getting his law license revoked, he taught college classes for several years and then successfully petitioned for readmission to the bar. Recently, Krogh, 68, teamed up with his son to write a book called “Integrity: Good People, Bad Choices, and Life Lessons from the White House.”

The Law Blog caught up with Krogh earlier today to discuss the panel, the relevance of Watergate to the legal profession, and how to repair one’s integrity after fouling it up.

Hi Bud. Thanks for chatting. Let’s start from the beginning. For your role in the Watergate Scandal, you were eventually disbarred, but then won readmission. Talk about that a bit.

I was first suspended in 1975 for pleading guilty to a felony. Later in ‘75, there were several hearings before a disciplinary board that recommended a 9 month suspension. That was overruled and I wound up getting disbarred. In 1977, I petitioned to the board of governors, and they said not enough time had elapsed to demonstrate I’d been fully rehabilitated. In 1979, the board of governors recommended reinstatement. That recommendation went up to Washington State Supreme Court, which voted 7-2 that I be reinstated pending passing the bar exam.

So you were about 40 when you had to re-take the bar.

I was 41. After getting reinstated, I was offered an associate position in the office of my lawyer in the attorney discipline process, William Dwyer. I stayed there until the firm dissolved 15 years later.

Your recent book is about integrity and the lessons you learned from your experience in the Nixon White House. Recently, several high-profile lawyers have made bad choices, and some of them will likely face disbarment as a result. What’s your advice to them?

Here’s my experience. I met my lawyer two weeks after pleading guilty. When I told him the story, he said, ‘I’m going to take your case, but here are the conditions. You’re likely to be imprisoned. Do your time honorably. Secondly, don’t write a book now, don’t capitalize on this. Thirdly, you have to take responsibility for what happened and make amends.’

I’m not sure what that meant at the time, but what it turned out to be for me was teaching for five years. I would counsel anyone who’s going through this to look directly at what your responsibility was, and then be willing to take whatever the consequences are. In my case, it was pleading guilty.

You were very young and under pressure from your superiors when you ordered investigators to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Are there modern parallels, either in politics or business, to your situation?

I think Enron was similar. We were operating under enormous pressure for results. In both cases there were high stakes, high expectations, and leaders that were not giving us good guidance as to what was ethical and what was not.

The press materials for tomorrow’s panel say you’ll be addressing what the legal profession did and didn’t learn from Watergate. What didn’t the profession learn from Watergate?

Look at the conduct of lawyers in the current administration. You have to be careful that you don’t give advice that’s suited primarily to what the client wants, rather than what the law dictates. The war on terror has spawned its own internal pressure on lawyers to come up with goal-oriented opinions.

The Watergate scandal was broken by two journalists who relied on an anonymous source. There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how much legal protection should be allotted to preserving the confidentiality of the journalist-source relationship. What do you think about that?

I think it is a good idea. If Woodward and Bernstein had been forced to disclose sources, for whatever reason, it could’ve had a negative effect on their ability to keep sources talking to them. I think it would be a good thing to give reporters some protection.

Sorry, but we’ve got to throw this out there. Your brother-in-law, Peter Horton, used to executive produce and direct one of our favorite TV shows, “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Yeah, Peter also played the character Gary on “Thirty Something” – the handsome guy with the long blonde hair.

Oh, we hadn’t made that connection. Thanks a lot Bud. And enjoy Minnesota tomorrow.

No problem. Thank you.

It often seems that Dov Charney, the owner of American Apparel, is known as much for his office space escapades as for his super-successful clothing lines. In the rash of sexual harassment suits that have been brought against Charney, the litigants are often underlings complaining about Charney’s allegedly flamboyant behavior in the workplace. But, in the most recent suit faced by Charney and American Apparel, Charney might finally be facing off against a personality as strong, or at least as quirky, as his own.

Yesterday, movie icon Woody Allen sued American Apparel in Manhattan federal court for at least $10 million for using his image on billboards and on the Internet. The suit, according to this AP report, complains of an American Apparel billboard featuring a frame from “Annie Hall,” a film that won Allen a best director Oscar, showing Allen dressed as a Hasidic Jew with a long beard, black hat and Yiddish text. (The billboard, pictured, is on the corner of Alvarado and Sunset in L.A. While Charney is Jewish, it’s not clear what connection consumers are meant to draw between American Apparel clothing and Allen dressed as a Hasidic jew.)

According to the report, the suit alleges that the billboard falsely implied that Allen sponsored, endorsed or was associated with American Apparel, and accuses the company of “blatant misappropriation and commercial use of Allen’s image” and notes that the company on its Web site promotes itself as one known for “provocative photography.”

L.A.-based American Apparel didn’t immediately reply to the AP’s request for comment.

OK, as far as Law Blog art goes, that plummeting line to your left is neither cool, nor handsome, nor to scale. But it gives a sense of what’s happened to the M&A market in the first quarter of 2008. While the final numbers aren’t in yet, the folks at Dealogic gave us a sneak peak at preliminary Q1 law-firm M&A rankings, with the official figs expected tomorrow.

In at least a couple regards, the charts for this year’s Q1 look similar to last year’s rankings: S&C still reigns supreme for both U.S. and global advisory. And S&C, Skadden and Simpson Thacher still dominate the top two spots for both domestic and global categories.

The difference from last year — surprise, surprise — is that deal work is down. Way down. By this time last year, the top 10 firms in the global category had 662 representations on deals, while the top 10 firms in the domestic category had 302 representations on deals. (Global includes domestic.)

This year, however, the figures are far lower — 180 representations in the global category and 141 domestic. The stats reflect firms that advise acquirers, targets and advisors.

LB’ers: M&A lawyers, please share — do you have enough work to keep you busy? Are you “redeploying” or just enjoying more free time?

It may not have been the most titillating news of the week, but the Law Blog understood the importance of Saturday’s WSJ story on the new Democratic nominees at the SEC, which has been operating with just three Republican commissioners since January. As reported, the two lawyer nominees — Luis Aguilar and Elisse Walter — “could smooth the way for dozens of other nominations bottled up in Congress” and spark long-awaited rule changes in the wake of the subprime mess and credit crunch. Last month, SEC Chairman Chris Cox said the SEC will likely vote by the summer on new rules guiding credit-ratings firms.

But if Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson has anything to say about, not only will that vote never happen, but Cox & Co. could be out of a job come summertime. Paulson’s sweeping plan to reorganize the patchwork of U.S. financial regulation — reported here and here on the front page of today’s WSJ — contains a recommendation for merging the SEC, which was created in 1934 to re-establish public trust in the post-Depression markets, with the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, created in 1974 to regulate commodities futures and options markets.

Why join the two commissions? As the theory goes, the fact that the SEC and CFTC have overlapping jurisdictions has led the “regulators to court the regulated.” Says Hal S. Scott, professor of international financial systems at Harvard, “It’s not a good idea to have people competing with each other, particularly if they’re competing in laxity.”

But Bart Chilton, the Commissioner of the CFTC objects. “I think most Americans would prefer that government do our jobs and that means doing everything possible to cauterize the subprime mess before performing major surgery on a regulatory system, parts of which are still very healthy,” he said.

LB’ers: Are there any securities regulation mavens out there? Would Paulson’s plan to merge (or eliminate) the SEC be akin to an overreaction to the current financial crisis?

Good night, sleep tight,
Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
And if they do
Then take your shoe
And knock ‘em ‘til
They’re black and blue!



Of all the things that go bump in the night, bedbugs might be the creepiest. But not so creepy, apparently, that they lead automatically to punitive damages.

Manhattan judge Judith J. Gische has, uh, scratched a request for punitive damages by two bedbug plaintiffs, while allowing their negligence claims to go forward. Debra Grogan and her daughter, Dana, both Maryland residents, were seeking $2 million in compensatory damages and an unspecified amount of punitives for bites they allegedly sustained during a two-night stay in New York City’s Milford Plaza in 2003. Click here for the gory details of the Grogan case, and here for a 2006 LB post on a different bedbug bite case.

In ruling out punitive damages, Gische distinguished a precedent on the grounds that, in a past case where the plaintiffs had won punis, the hotel in question had been aware of the bedbugs but decided not to fumigate the premises. Milford Plaza, by contrast, had under contract a pest control company, which, three weeks prior to the Grogan’s stay, had been asked to exterminate bedbugs in two rooms near the room reserved by the Grogans.

However, Judge Gische wrote, the Grogans had presented enough evidence that the hotel had “constructive notice” of the need to fumigate room 1540 to deny the defendants’ summary judgment motion. The case must go to trial, Gische ruled, because Novak’s affidavit “set forth genuine issues of fact about the life span of bedbugs, how they migrate and whether these factors should have been (or were) taken into consideration by the defendants in how rooms were treated following bedbug complaints by other guests.”

Milford Plaza is represented by Andrew J. Funk of Smith Mazure, while the Grogans are represented by Hayley R. Greenberg of Greenberg & Merola.