every word and that’s very danger- ous. My advice to clients is that you allow your lawyers to speak for you and if you don’t have to publicly give statements you should not because there are people waiting to take your deposition or investigators to charge you with perjury or obstruction of justice for your comments. I tell my clients, “If we don’t have to, you don’t have to make a public statement.” We represent a lot of politicians. Sometimes a politician has to respond to public matters but we caution them to be very careful not to address the merits of the lawsuit because people are waiting to judge every single word you give.
If there was one person, one matter, one case, or one client that you could pick or repre- sent throughout history, what or who would it be? I don’t know if there is one particular case that I could identify. Tere are a series of cases that were troubling to me throughout law school, and even today, when we deal with issues of discrimination, diversity, and inclu- sion. Tat was systemic exclusion of African Americans from basic rights as American citizens. You think back to the Plessy v. Ferguson case when blacks were denied access to public
accommodation. In answering that, I would like to say I’m creating some new creative legal argument but I would really have liked to have been at the elbow of Charles Hamilton Houston when he developed the use of the laws to combat discrimination and it was not until the later years, not during Plessy v. Ferguson, not during the Civil Rights cases, not until much later, around Brown v. Board of Education and some of the later era, that some of the theories and strategy of Charles Hamilton Houston was used to legally break down the barriers of discrimination. So I really would have liked to have been around when Mr. Houston came up with his brilliant legal theory and watched the laws and the implementation of the discrimination laws change.
Recently several law firms have gone out of business. Do you have any observations on the changing dynamics of corporate law? I do. Law firms have gotten so large and they have corporations that are backing away from accepting tradi- tional legal constructs of billing prac- tices. I was a partner in big firms for almost 20 years and now the majority owner of my own law firm with my partner Jeffrey Gitner. We’re a small
Some of the NBA players would always tell me, “Leave everything you have on the floor, so when the game is over, you’re not questioning.” In my law practice I put everything into my court cases.
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firm—we have four lawyers—we all came from big law firms. I’ve had the ability to examine lawyers—first-year lawyers, second-year associates—and when I would try to bill research to a first-year lawyer and turn the bill into a corporate client the corporate client would frequently reject the bill saying, “I’m not paying you to train these first- and second-year lawyers.” I think that the corporations started
changing the billing model. Some firms, some partners, bill $1,000 an hour or more so you can see how on a major piece of litigation, if you have 2-3 partners, and the time of associates—I know one major matter we were involved with—a big firm—I looked around the room and I think we had three partners billing an average of $800 an hour. Tat’s $2,500 an hour for the partners and you might have 5 or 6 associates and they were aver- aging $500-600 an hour. At the end of the day you are at $40,000-50,000 a day in billings and I think corporations were looking at that and saying that they can- not afford those type of fees. So I think the entire structure of corporate America is changing. If corporate America changes the way it is willing to pay big firms, big firms will make appropriate changes or go out of business.
Why are larger law firms slow to adopt diversity and inclusion? It’s a statistically known fact that law firms lag behind corporate America in implementing diversity and inclusion throughout its ranks—both associates and partners—if you look at most major law firms and statistics are available the numbers are astounding of how few African American partners there are in major law firms. I think that a lot of the major
corporations have recognized they are receiving legal advice from law firms on how to implement policies to avoid employment discrimination lawsuits do not apply those same standards at the law firms. I know a few years back corporations got together to come up with what they called “A Call to
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