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June 13, 2008 8:00 PM

This Week in Law

Posted by Ben Hallman

Welcome to This Week in Law, The Am Law Daily's roundup of the best legal news on the planet. Each week in this space we will deliver to you, our soon-to-be loyal readers, a day-by-day digest of the lawyer and legal-related goings-on that you need to know if you don't want to get fired from your job and evicted from your home. That's right: We think the latest Supreme Court news, layoffs at Sonnenschein, and the secret recipe of the all-lawyer team in Safeway's National Capital Barbecue Battle is just that important. (We may be wrong, but do you really want to chance it?)

Before we leap into this week's edition, a word about the meaning of "best." How do we determine "good" legal news from "bad," much less "best" from "pretty darn good"? The answer, readers, depends largely on you. Tell us what is important to you and what is not, as well as what may not be important at all but that you simply enjoy reading. More business of law? More lawyers at play? More cowbell? You got it. Send your missives, complaints, and fan mail to This Week in Law's lead writer, Ben Hallman, at bhallman@alm.com.

Now, on to the news.

We apologize for starting the week on such a sour note, but Am Law’s air conditioning was on the blink Monday, and only a 4:00 p.m. mercy Popsicle run by one of our editors prevented tempers from running over and ruining the carpet. In honor of our foul mood, we begin with a bit of nastiness courtesy of the Kasowitz Benson law firm. Last week, Jeremy Pitcock, who led the firm's intellectual property practice before name partner Marc Kasowitz fired him in December, filed a $90 million defamation lawsuit against his former firm for what he calls the "malicious and unwarranted smear campaign" that followed his dismissal. In January, after Pitcock landed at Morgan & Finnegan, Kasowitz issued a press release saying that Pitcock was fired for "extremely inappropriate personal conduct."

What's more inappropriate than publicly bashing a former colleague, you might wonder? According to Pitcock, he shared a "brief, consensual kiss" with an associate in her apartment. (Let the record show that Pitcock is married, and at the time of the kiss, his wife was pregnant with their second child). Kasowitz declined to respond to the lawsuit, but he told The New York Times's Dealbook that Pitcock was fired for "a pattern of inappropriate behavior." Frankly, TWIL was less surprised by the philandering of a Big Law partner than by the fortitude of Am Law reporter (and native Alaskan) Nate Raymond. Nate gallantly overcame both the unfamiliar heat and a troublesome phone system to ask which other firms allow the managing partner to unilaterally fire a partner in his thoughtful follow-up about the Kasowitz kerfuffle.

Tuesday dawned bright and hot at Am Law headquarters in New York. The air conditioning was still on the blink, but four partners from Mayer Brown's Supreme Court and appellate practice braved the heat to come talk to our news staff. David Gossett, Lauren Goldman, and Timothy Bishop joined Andrew Frey, a
former deputy solicitor general at the Department of Justice and veteran of 64 Supreme Court oral arguments, including 11 since he joined Mayer Brown in 1986. (Most recently, Frey argued Philip Morris v. Williams, in which the Supreme Court overturned a $76.8 million award granted by the Oregon court to the widow of a lung cancer victim). Asked about how he prepares for arguments before the court, Frey said he writes an outline, but not a script, because he assumes he will be cut off by questions after two minutes anyway. (Prior to an appearance, Mayer Brown lawyers say they pore over their brief, trying to identify what questions the justices might ask).

Also on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal's Nathan Koppel--an Am Law alum--penned this follow-up about the California court decision that legalized gay marriage. What happens, he asks, if they want to divorce? "To wind down a relationship, same-sex couples have to navigate a process that may force them to appear in three different courts, including a civil court that treats the separation as a business breakup," Nathan wrote.

Out in the real world, Tony Angel, managing partner at Linklaters for ten years before stepping aside last year, announced that he was leaving the firm for Standard & Poor's. The American Lawyer's Michael Goldhaber profiled Angel last October.

It’s been a tough year for capital markets practices, and a brutal year for lawyers who specialized in securitizing mortgages. On Wednesday, The National Law Journal reported that over the past six months, ten partners have left Thacher Proffitt, one of the hardest-hit firms. (For the backstory, check out this article from the March issue of The American Lawyer.)

Photo by respres/flickr.

TWIL has been following the mortgage crisis, and the ensuing credit crunch, from the start, and we thought we knew everything there was to know. But then we listened to "The Giant Pool of Money," on National Public Radio's This American Life, which turned out to be the single-best summary of the cycle of greed that led to the current predicament that we have heard. (The story is about a month old, so unfortunately, it will cost you 95 cents to download the podcast.)

On Thursday, in case you missed it, New York Times national legal correspondent Adam Liptak continued his thought-provoking series on how the justice system in the United States differs from those of the rest of the world, with perhaps his best article yet. American notions about free speech are not necessarily shared by many of our Western allies, including Canada, he wrote.

A few minutes after the Supreme Court's Thursday ruling that Guantánamo Bay detainees have a constitutional right to challenge their detentions in Federal Court, TWIL asked a colleague to remind us how this case evolved out of the Hamdan v. Rumsfield and Rasul v. Bush cases. An informational graphic sure would be helpful, we mused. Ask, and ye shall receive. On Friday The New York Times printed a chart called "Skirmishing Over Detainees" that we found extremely helpful in refreshing our memory.

A bit farther afield, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said that talks with the United States on a security pact were at a stalemate because of U.S. demands that encroached on Iraq's sovereignty. The U.N. mandate that provides the legal justification for the continued presence of U.S. forces on Iraqi soil, including their right to capture and detain prisoners, expires at the end of the year. "We have reached a deadlock, because when we started the talks, we found that the U.S. demands hugely infringe on the sovereignty of Iraq, and this we can never accept," Maliki said, according to The New York Times. Time magazine published a nice backgrounder on the mandate and the talks.

Finally, late Friday, while you were packing up your Trapper Keeper and daydreaming about the weekend, R&B superstar R. Kelly was acquitted of child pornography charges. Kelly's lawyer was Chicago criminal defense attorney Ed Genson, who also represented Conrad Black. For more on the Black trial, and Genson, check out Am Law reporter Ross Todd's story.

TWIL Notes: In the future, we will use this space to acknowledge other happenings in the legal world. This week, however, we pay homage to our naming inspiration, the baseball highlights show This Week in Baseball, and its original host, Mel Allen, the legendary Yankees broadcaster and native of the great state of Alabama. (Here's a YouTube clip of Allen on meeting Babe Ruth.)

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