Legal Pad

Ice cream on spoon, malpractice on the brain

If you have to be in a windowless conference room on a sunny Saturday afternoon, it helps to be surrounded by huge tubs of ice cream, with all the toppings, and trays of fruit tarts, chocolate truffles and tiramisu.

The law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson arranged the early afternoon dessert reception to honor partner Jeffrey Bleich, who was sworn in hours earlier as president of the State Bar. As Bleich’s 12-year-old son Matthew cradled a root beer float, the new prez mostly forsook the sweets to greet his guests.

STATE BAR in ANAHEIM Matthew Hirsch, reporting from the State Bar's annual meeting in Anaheim this weekend, also heard about an attorney who goes panhandling in Westwood and what wannabe judges should not do.

Bleich told Legal Pad he’s been heartened by the way lawyers have volunteered to help boost pro bono representation for kids in foster care and get banks to raise interest rates for client trust accounts to help fund legal service, two of Bleich’s goals for the coming year: “People have been handing me [business] cards left and right,” he said.

Clearly, Bleich has transitioned smoothly into a leadership role here at the State Bar’s 80th annual meeting in Anaheim. But when the State Bar's Board of Governors votes Nov. 9 on malpractice insurance disclosure, a hot topic at this annual meeting, Bleich’s opinion might not matter most.

Court’s New Hairstyle: A Mohawk

What do you get when you put a bunch of lawyers in a room with alcohol and electric razors?

A hell of a fundraiser, apparently. One of our reporters, Millie Lapidario, reported on San Francisco's "Buzz the Fuzz" challenge this week, where a fundraiser for cancer patients motivated lawyers to, variously, cut off their ponytails, shave their heads, and sport a Mohawk in court.

You can visit Cal Law to read all about it, and you can see some of the, shall we say, hot styles in this slideshow put together by photographer Jason Doiy.

—  Pam Smith

In Diverse Hiring, It's Baby Steps

The Big Six public utility companies had to stand up and deliver this week in front of the California Public Utilities Commission, which held its annual diversity en banc hearing in Los Angeles Tuesday.

PG&E, AT&T, Southern California Edison, Southern California Gas Co., San Diego Gas & Electric Co. and Verizon representatives answered preliminary questions about how much money they spent in 2006 on diverse law firms, those that are more than 50 percent owned by minorities or women.

The PUC — which encourages the companies it regulates to spend at least 21.5 percent of their budgets on diverse vendors — has in recent years shined a light on the legal and financial professions, where the commissioners feel much improvement can be made.

On their face, the numbers Tuesday told a sad story. Several companies, including Verizon and AT&T, appeared to have fared badly — or worse than in 2005.

Attorneys' Fees — The hard way

Hanging out at the Bench and Bar Art Exhibit today inside the Anaheim Marriott hotel, Eileen Rapke, an L.A. entertainment attorney and sometimes performance artist, described how she spent seven hours in character as the fictitious “Betty Smolic.”

Betty (pictured at left) speaks softly, Rapke said in a hushed tone. “She wears dull floral dresses, and she’s as tightly wound as her hair.” A portrait photo of Betty won high praise at the exhibition here, but the image of Rapke portraying “The Anonymous Beggar” might generate more buzz.

As the beggar, dressed in a stained garment plucked off the rack at a thrift store, Rapke beat a path through Westwood, where she lives, in search of spare change.

STATE BAR in ANAHEIM Matthew Hirsch, reporting from the State Bar's annual meeting in Anaheim this weekend, also heard about what wannabe judges should not do.

“I’m used to being very independent, particularly as a lawyer,” Rapke said. “[Portraying 'The Anonymous Beggar'] got me in touch with my personal fears. You know, what would happen if I lost all my money? … And I realized, nobody could take my dignity away.”

A new perspective gained, Rapke said she handed off the $4.60 she had collected to others seeking a token of charity.

But how could Rapke be sure those people were really poor — and not lawyers?

“I don’t know,” she said.

—  Matthew Hirsch

The Sticky Note is Mightier Than the Sword

A little word of advice for wannabe judges: that tall stack of recommendation letters from lawyers who sorta seem to like you might actually do more harm than good.

STATE BAR in ANAHEIM Matthew Hirsch is reporting from the State Bar's annual meeting in Anaheim this weekend.

Today at the State Bar’s 80th annual meeting in Anaheim, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s judicial appointments secretary, Sharon Majors-Lewis, made it clear that she’s not impressed by attorneys who show their popularity by submitting up to 100 letters of support — especially if those letters use the same boilerplate text.

Sometimes, Majors-Lewis said, she gets candid notes affixed to recommendation letters that paint a less desirable picture of the candidates.

One came with a Post-It note, she said, that claimed the candidate was really not a good contender at all, because that person was “lazy.”

Pillsbury Monkeys With Its Wikipedia Entry?

The battle in the courtroom over whether Pillsbury should be ejected from the SonicBlue bankruptcy case for failing to disclose a conflict was all over by March. But the battle over whether the snafu should be mentioned on the firm’s Wikepedia entry raged on between wiki-editor types and someone(s) with Pillsbury IP addresses for much of the summer.

(You can find out just who’s changing Wikipedia entries using the Wikiscanner.)

According to the history section on Pillsbury’s Wikipedia page, it all began in late May when a contributor with the handle “Knowsetfree” added a blurb about the case under the heading “misconduct.” Then, in the beginning of May, someone with a Pillsbury IP address went in and removed the section.

After that, utter Wiki-mayhem ensued. Another wiki contributor added the misconduct section again, and again someone from Pillsbury’s IP address took it down. This back-and-forth occurred a total of four times.

Somewhat peeved, Mr. Knowsetfree called the IP address out and challenged it to explain why it kept taking the misconduct section down. With no explanation apparently forthcoming, Knowsetfree declared that the edits were wiki-vandalism.

Finally, the Pillsbury person gave up and left the thing on there, but not before moving it to the bottom of the page instead of the middle. (You can’t say they’re not persistent!)

What do you think: Should law firms be able to remove damning material from Wikipedia entries? Or is that just weasely behavior?

—  Zusha Elinson

Gov. Signs Meter Reader, Child-Support Bills

The governor must have writer's cramp, because he has been pretty slow to sign or veto the hundreds of bills that the Legislature piled on his desk earlier this month. But here are a few he acted on yesterday.

The signed:

• SB 415 will overturn existing case law,  In re Marriage of Lautsbaugh (1999) 72 Cal. App. 4th 1131, by allowing divorced spouses to petition a court for higher spousal support after court-ordered child support payments end. The author, Sen. Tom Harman, R-Huntington Beach, says the new law, which sunsets in 2011, will, in the typical situation, let a wife seek higher payments when a child has graduated from high school and the ex-husband's obligation to pay child support has ended, but the child still lives at home and still costs the same to feed, clothe and house.
• SB 523 sets up a pilot program that will allow San Mateo County trial court judges to order parents to look for work at the same time they're hit with child-support orders. County officials hope this three-year program will discourage parents from working under the table to avoid paying child support while preventing others from becoming delinquent on their payments.
• AB 1686, the Don't-Beat-Up-the-Meter-Reader law, increases fines and penalties for assaulting a "parking control officer." Author Assemblyman Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, says his hometown reported 28 assaults on meter officers in 2006, a 64 percent increase.

The rejected:

• AB 553, backed by public employee unions, would have created a preemption issue at the state and county level. Assemblyman Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, wanted to give the state Public Employment Relations Board, or PERB, not courts, the authority to intervene in strikes targeting local agencies. No way, said the governor. Local courts are "sufficiently suited" to force public employees back to work if the public's health and safety are at risk.

The governor has two more weeks to sign or veto the mountain of bills on his desk.

—  Cheryl Miller

Judge Draws Fire for $9.11 Giuliani Fundraiser

We’re sure that some people who become federal judges take the job for the prestige, the lifetime tenure, or the power it confers. But for the small number of people who leave the bench by any means other than a wheelchair, having the job has another benefit: Judging by Abraham Sofaer, it apparently makes you an expert on everything — with the exception, perhaps, of marketing.

Sofaer, a onetime district court judge, is all over Silicon Valley these days. He’s a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and was brought onto the board of directors at Rambus, the troubled chip company, apparently to help it gain a modicum of credibility (Sofaer is the board member in charge of investigating the company’s past stock options problems). He was also hired by another distressed company, Marvell, to investigate allegations of bias in its internal probe of stock options problems. And word around the Valley is that he’s being brought into other companies to help work out their corporate governance kinks. We even saw him at a panel at this summer’s ABA conference talking about terrorism.

Which brings us to the one area where Sofaer would have a hard time claiming expertise: According to various press reports over the last few days, the former judge tonight is holding a fundraiser in his Palo Alto home for Rudolph Giuliani, and asking attendees to contribute $9.11 to the ex-New York mayor’s presidential campaign as a way of commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The $9.11 has provoked outrage among NYC firefighters and Democrats, who call it a crass attempt to draw on a tragedy for cash.

We here have always wondered why Giuliani runs as a terrorism-fighter on his record of having that catastrophic event happen on his candidate’s watch; it seems roughly akin to Mitt Romney using Boston’s infamous Big Dig as proof that he knows how to run a public works project. But alas, perhaps that’s what happens when you have a federal judge holding fundraisers.

It’s only fair to point out, though, that Sofaer told the AP the $9.11 wasn’t his idea — he apparently just went along with someone else. But we don’t know for sure, since he has yet to return our calls.

—  Justin Scheck

Could Justices Mimic Mayor's Dramatic Turn?

Twenty local governments signed an amicus curiae brief filed today, taking the San Francisco city attorney’s side in the Supreme Court battle over California’s gay marriage ban. We don’t know all that went on behind the scenes to collect the support of places from sprawling L.A. to smallish Fairfax. But we do know that getting San Diego’s signature proved to be something of a roller coaster: Its city council deadlocked before narrowly voting to sign, only to have the mayor threaten to veto the idea (perhaps meaninglessly, but that’s a detail) — and then dramatically change his mind and get behind it.

Danny Chou, chief of appellate litigation at the San Francisco city attorney’s office, said this particular amicus brief (pdf) — in a case that’s already drawn scads of amici on both sides — shows “that marriage equality is an important issue for the government.”

And in Legal Pad’s opinion, San Diego’s vacillation turned out to be a bonus for the city …

Judges Tired of Waiting for Russoniello?

We’ve been hearing for months that the Joseph Russoniello of Cooley Godward Kronish — who served as U.S. Attorney in the 1980s — could be nominated to be San Francisco’s U.S. attorney any day. Of course, he hasn’t been, and no one seems to know why (though it’s hard to imagine that the turmoil at the top levels of the U.S. Justice Department isn’t having an effect). Complicating matters on the local level is the fact that the bench, and many assistant U.S. attorneys, have become big boosters of Scott Schools, whose time as interim U.S. attorney has been marked by improved morale and a lack of complaints from prosecutors who chafed under predecessor Kevin Ryan.

Over the past two weeks, rumors have been blowing around the San Francisco federal building that Russoniello’s nomination is even closer than ever — really! — and that Schools had told his subordinates he plans to take a Justice Department job back in Washington. The date everyone was discussing was Oct. 12, which is when — according to a federal law passed in June — the Justice Department would have to either nominate a new U.S. attorney or let the Northern District judges, led by Chief Judge Vaughn Walker, appoint an interim.

On Tuesday, the judges took the matter into their own hands, issuing a press release saying that they’d unanimously signed off on Schools continuing in the interim role.