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Video: The changing face of health-care law

The health-care practice has undergone many evolutions. Doug Swill of Drinker Biddle & Reath shares his insights into the practice, how it has changed and why it’s a flourishing area for Chicago lawyers.

And don’t miss this month’s cover story about health-care law.

Attorneys in Transition: Starting A New Law Firm

More than 100 lawyers attended the recent Attorneys in Transition seminar hosted Law Bulletin Publishing Co. and The John Marshall Law School at The John Marshall Law School. The event included three panel discussions held on topics that ranged from how to get a small firm up and running to position for that next career transition.

Panelists included Daliah Saper, of Saper Law Offices; Cliff Scott-Rudnick, The John Marshall Law School; Jay Miller, a solo practitioner; and Russell Hartigan, of Hartigan & O’Connor; Walter Roth, of Meckler Bulger Tilson Marick & Pearson, and Professional Investment Consulting, LLC; Kevin Chern, of Total Attorneys; Mike Everly, of Avenue Business Center; Adam Radulovic, of XL.net; Sandra Bishop, of Executive Solutions; Donald Brown, of Donohue Brown Mathewson & Smyth; and David Glynn, of Law Bulletin Publishing Co. Enjoy the photos below by Colleen O’Brien. Visit the Attorneys in Transition Web site for more information about this and other events.

3L and the City: A Favorite Supreme Court Rule

By: Brandon Stark
5starkb@law.jmls.edu

Lawyers outside Illinois, and even some in Illinois, have no idea what you are talking about when you refer to the Illinois Supreme Court Rule 711 license.

When I first heard about the 711 license, it conjured up images of standing in line to receive your law degree while ordering a cherry-flavored Slurpee, the best Slurpee flavor there ever was.

I was initially disappointed to hear that I couldn’t get my 711 license from 7-Eleven and that it didn’t come with a Transformers collector’s cup, but my dismay was quelled when I finally received the license in the mail.

The ID card itself looks to have been put together by a junior high student with a computer and a lamination machine. With only the text of the Supreme Court rule on the back, the front has a cutout picture of me (which I supplied) that appears to be pasted on with a glue stick. Next to the picture is the faded, photocopied signature of somebody I’ve never heard of, the minuscule seal of the Illinois Supreme Court and my misspelled name in bold.

For all its amateurish look, the 711 license is magical.

It allows third-year law students like me to pretend to be real lawyers with none of the perquisites, like getting paid. In lieu of a paycheck we get something you can’t put a price tag on: knowledge. Well, that’s not entirely true, because law schools have placed a pretty sizable dollar amount on what knowledge costs, but I digress.

Students who have completed three-fifths of their law school curriculum and are in good academic standing can apply for a 711 license.

In doing so, students working for a legal aid bureau, a law clinic, the public defender’s office, the state’s attorney’s office, the public guardian’s office, or a law office of the state or any of its subdivisions can basically serve as a real, full-fledged attorney in court. The rule requires in-court supervision by licensed attorneys for criminal cases and supervisor signatures on pleadings and motions, but 711 clerks conduct hearings and trials like real lawyers.

From my own experience and talking with others, one of the advantages “711s,” have over attorneys is that judges are more understanding when you slow down their daily call than if an attorney slows it down. Judges also seem to have fun with 711 clerks, prompting us to argue more fervently to win an objection or argument.

I hear that some judges’ favorite trials are those conducted by one 711 from the state’s attorney’s office and another from the public defender’s office.

I’ve come to realize since obtaining my 711 license that there is a world of difference between mock trial and real court, which law schools seem to underplay.

Mock trial competitions are promoted heavily at law schools, and they are certainly helpful for students planning to become litigators, but mock trials pale in comparison to the real thing.

Unlike a mock trial competition, in real court you can be handed the case file the day of trial, which leaves you no time to choreograph your closing statement or objections. You sink or swim based on what you’ve already learned in law school until this point. And you pray your first chair will throw you a life preserver if you start to cramp up when the sharks begin to circle.

Maybe because the life preserver is there, most law clerks will tell you their first chairs have no compunction about throwing the 711s into the deep end right away. I was pretty coy and able to schmooze my attorneys a little, so they let me ease into the job and didn’t have me in front of a judge doing hearings until my second day on the job.

About two months later, my second trial as a 711 clerk for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office was a narcotics case expected to result in a plea.

It didn’t, and I had about 15 minutes to prepare the police officer before putting him on the stand.

The trial went extremely well. I think I looked confident, even though I was constantly in fear of doing something incredibly stupid.

The direct examination of the police officer went relatively smoothly, without any objections from the other side. After the assistant public defender’s cross-examination, he made his obligatory motion for a directed verdict.

I was able to confidently and pretty coherently argue against the motion reciting the facts in a light most favorable to our side. The judge seemed pleased, nodding along with my argument, and when I was done she granted the motion for a directed verdict for the defendant.

Despite the loss, it was a great experience. All the public defenders came over and congratulated me on a fine job, which was quite touching and made me feel as if I truly belonged in the legal community.

Looking forward in my legal career, I feel so much better having some trial experience before I graduate. With some more trials and numerous other hearings under my belt, I am confident that after law school I can succeed as an actual attorney instead of trying to pay off my student loans by selling cherry Slurpees at a 7-Eleven.

Law Firms Beef Up Their White-Collar Practices

By: Olivia Clarke
oclarke@lbpc.com

When Jim Mutchnik started in Kirkland & Ellis’ white-collar criminal defense practice in 2000 he was only the fourth Kirkland lawyer to enter the practice. Today, about 40 Kirkland lawyers spend the majority of their time on white-collar matters.

“It is something we, as a law firm, want to invest in. We’ve grown it slowly,” said Mutchnik, who worked in the U.S. Department of Justice for nine years before coming to Kirkland. “Over the last two or three years we’ve come to a realization that it is a practice that can be defined as a practice, and investments in the right people at the right time can make it grow, and grow not just as a group inside of itself, but can grow the litigation practice generally.”

White-collar scandals involving such companies as Enron and WorldCom and individuals like Bernie Madoff, combined with a fallen economy and a new Democratic president, have created — as one lawyer termed it — the perfect storm for a strong white-collar criminal defense practice.

Many large law firms now see the importance of having white-collar defense practices that can assist their clients.

Smaller firms have specialized in this practice for years, but many companies like the large amount of resources and manpower that large firms can dedicate to their white-collar criminal defense needs.

People from places like the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office take jobs in these larger firms.

“I’m a nine-year government man,” Mutchnik said. “I had finished a big case, and it was time to try something new. One of the problems with the government is you tend to do one thing, especially in a big case like that, and you don’t get the flexibility to take on multiple things.

“In a law firm I can be an antitrust lawyer. I can be a criminal lawyer. I can be a litigator, but most importantly I can be a business counselor and that part of the job can be the best. …. We get to help companies get better — how they better behave, how they compete, how they deal with problems. It’s a lot more strategy and consulting as much as litigation.”

Pravin Rao worked for the SEC and the U.S. attorney’s office before joining Perkins Coie’s investigations and white-collar defense practice in 2007. Having this background helps his credibility in his clients’ eyes, he said.

Legal matters related to economics have become as important to the government as matters related to terrorism, he said. Many good federal agents are being put onto economic-related white-collar investigations.

“When I was at the SEC, a financial fraud case, a significant one, could take years. It doesn’t happen in six months,” Rao said. “The economic crisis started six months or a year ago, and it will take another year before the flood gates do open up and lots of investigations [begin] percolating or subpoenas start flying. I am personally preparing for it to be busier a year from now. Decent firms have got to be doing the same. They are tooling up.”

An evolution

After the Arthur Andersen and Enron scandals, and President Clinton established a federal fraud task force, the climate and the way corporations handled civil and criminal investigations changed, Rao said.

More self-reflection exists today for companies, and they act on whistle-blower complaints, government inquiries, and overall concerns a lot more quickly, he said.

“C-level officers are going to be on the hook for what a company did criminally and civilly,” Rao said. “That puts people on notice. If they sign a financial filing, they’ll be on the hook and that makes it much more personal, and much more important what is done in the initial steps.”

In the ’90s, firms that practiced white-collar defense tended to be small law firms that represented mostly individuals because that’s who was being prosecuted, said Kirkland’s Mutchnik. As the government shifted its focus, particularly on the federal side, and started initiating more corporate investigations, the practice migrated to match that focus, he said.

Beginning in the ’90s the federal side started going after the money first instead of the individual, he said. In health care, for example, it became “less about nailing the doctors and more about nailing the groups of doctors. It got bigger and the money got bigger,” Mutchnik said.

This practice area is growing “by leaps and bounds,” said Gil Soffer, co-chair of Katten Muchin Rosenman’s national white-collar practice.

The economic downturn has caused a broader assortment and a higher incidence of white-collar crimes, Soffer said. And, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) has gotten a real push from the U.S. Department of Justice, and there is every indication that will continue to grow. There is also a revival of antitrust and environmental law enforcement.

“[White collar] is the most dramatic area of the practice of law,” said Soffer, who joined the firm in 2000 after working as an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago for six years. “You are dealing with law and human emotions. … It goes to the heart of our economy. Think how Madoff affected so many people and involved so many dollars.”

Sean Berkowitz was an assistant U.S. attorney before joining Latham & Watkins’ white-collar and government investigations and securities litigation and professional liability practices. In the last 10 to 15 years, the practice has expanded greatly on the defense side, Berkowitz said.

“I’ve just been back in private practice for three years, and it’s been a very busy three years,” he said. “Enforcement has expanded dramatically in the last several years, and the number of cases brought by the justice department has increased exponentially. …

“More and more corporations are operating in a worldwide business environment and potentially getting themselves into areas where they might not have been as exposed several years ago.”

The government now spends more money and time looking into such areas as government procurement fraud and health-care fraud, he said. And he believes there will be a continued focus on FCPA, given that companies do more business worldwide.

“I expect we will see a lot of increased enforcement activity coming out of the SEC with all of the financial institution issues and problems we’ve seen over the last several years,” Berkowitz said.

Mayer Brown partner Vince Connelly has handled white-collar criminal defense work at his firm for 22 years. When he started at the firm he was one of a few big-firm lawyers doing this type of work.

“Now all of [the large firms] do, and almost all of them have more than one person,” Connelly said. “It’s enlarged and become pretty mandatory if you’re a firm of any large size.”

Firms began offering this practice, he said, because, “One, it’s very awkward for a full-service law firm to not be able to address this kind of need for its clients. It’s arguably dangerous to send a client of high importance to them away. They may start to rethink the overall relationship with you.

“The second reason is because of the expansion on the federal side of things. Now there is a criminal component where there was either a civil or regulatory [side]. Running into a federal criminal problem has dramatically increased. Clients have a greater need.”

Patrick Cotter, the Chicago coordinator for the white-collar criminal defense practice at Barnes & Thornburg, said his firm’s white-collar practice involves a substantial amount of client consultation because clients often get nervous about regulations and do not want to cross any lines.

Clients like to work on white-collar matters with those lawyers who already know their business, and know what to look for so they can get ahead of the curve, said Cotter, who worked as an assistant U.S. attorney in New York, where he was a prosecutor in United States v. John Gotti.

“There was a time when corporations were not regularly targeted for criminal investigations,” Cotter said. “What’s happened since the mid-’90s is that mentality has completely changed. …. The old notion is business is business and unless you get involved in personal wrongdoing it is handled through fines. That is the old mind-set.”

The relationship

Law firms have vigorously jumped into the white-collar criminal defense practice because they’ve discovered a market, Cotter said. The clients they have represented for years now have needs related to white-collar criminal defense.

“The traditional model of the lone wolf criminal defense attorney who’s the Perry Mason who got into his office where there is two or three young associates … that guy, that model, I think, has been perceived as not the best model for defending and representing the kind of complex white-collar cases we are seeing today,” Cotter said. “It is not big enough. It doesn’t have the depth of support. It doesn’t have the breadth of legal knowledge that can be necessary in these kinds of cases.”

For example, Cotter said an antitrust investigation came to the firm recently. In the first subpoena several million pieces of correspondences and e-mail records were requested. It will call on lawyers with a wealth of experience in such areas as antitrust law, criminal law, and patent law. A smaller firm may not have experts in all those areas, he said.

“In this firm you can call on five or six people who each have that depth,” he said. “I think a lot of modern, big white-collar [matters are] too big for any one lawyer.”

While large law firms may represent the large corporation or company in a white-collar matter, a smaller firm will often represent individual executives in that same matter.

In 1998 Joe Duffy and Dave Stetler started Stetler & Duffy, a small firm that handles any type of complex litigation including white-collar defense work.

Stetler started his career working for the IRS and the U.S. Department of Justice doing criminal tax work. He then spent about 10 years at the U.S. attorney’s office before moving to McDermott Will & Emery in 1988.

But he said he didn’t like the types of white-collar work lawyers in big firms handled and wanted to get back to being a pure trial lawyer.

“It’s frustrating when you’re at a big firm and representing a big company because these companies cannot afford to go to trial,” Stetler said. “The risk to the company is too large. … I did not feel challenged in representing companies. I like representing human beings.

“If a partner at a big firm represents a big company at a big investigation they know that they are not going to be able to represent the employees and the officers of the corporation. I am likely to get a call from one of the big law firms, asking, ‘Are you available to represent the CEO or the CFO or whomever?’ And I will say yes.”

White-collar practices have existed for years in large law firms, but large firms now market those practices more, Stetler said. Law firms utilize lawyers coming out of such offices as the U.S. attorney’s office differently today.

“They can be more of a prosecutor than a defense attorney,” he said. “They are doing what they did before, but they’re just getting paid more than before. Back until the mid-’80s, big firms wouldn’t touch any lawyer if they thought they handled anything associated with the word criminal. It was like, ‘Ooh, we don’t do that kind of thing.’

“What really changed things in a big way was when Dan Webb left the U.S. attorney’s office and went to Winston & Strawn. … That changed things, I think, dramatically. People started realizing, ‘Wait a second, this can be pretty lucrative.’”

Anytime there is a financial failure, of especially a public company or a fund that attracted investors, and there is what appears to be suspicious activity on the part of insiders, the government puts a lot of money and investigators into determining if there were any false statements to shareholders or investors — and these cases can be huge, said Michael Monico, founding partner of Monico, Pavich & Spevack. He was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois from 1973 to 1977.

Inevitably the large firm will represent the corporation, but if an executive’s testimony is sought through the grand jury process or the FBI seeks to interview that person, the large firm will seek out a smaller firm to represent the individual, Monico said. A large firm typically cannot represent that individual due to conflicts of interest, he said.

“Not only is it possible to co-exist, but it is important for small firms to have good working relationships with large firms,” Monico said. “It’s important that [large firms] work with small firms that have a lot of experience in these matters, who are used to dealing with the Department of Justice both here and in Washington, and who are likely to not have conflicts, especially now that all these firms are getting so big.”

Prior experience

Patrick Collins, who established the investigations and white-collar practice in Perkins Coie’s Chicago office, said a significant amount of his practice involves internal investigations.

A company may initiate an investigation if it gets a subpoena and wants to do further review. The company wants to get ahead of the curve, or look into an allegation made by a whistle-blower, Collins said. He also gets hired to investigate or prosecute a case on behalf of a government entity.

Having been an assistant U.S. attorney for 12 years helps him at the firm because he knows how to try a case, and understands how a fact makes it into a case and how it will play out in a closing argument, he said. When a subpoena gets issued, he will generally understand where the government is heading.

His experience also helped him develop strong investigative skills, which help during internal investigations.

“Often in a high-stakes matter a company or an individual wants to know what this means. What’s going on inside the government. … What variables at the end of the day will have tangible consequences for the company,” he said. “People with our backgrounds are good translators for that process.”

Soffer, from Katten, said having prosecutorial experience helps because he knows how the process works on the other side. With this experience he can crystallize the relevant facts discovered among a formidable amount of information.

“You know firsthand what is of interest to the government and what is of concern to the government — what is going to be satisfactory to the government ultimately if you want to resolve the case,” he said. “Secondarily, you have the ability to get to the bottom of an issue and work with a large entity when they are in trouble.”

There was a time when large firms didn’t have white-collar practices and didn’t necessarily respect this type of practice, said Patricia Brown Holmes, an equity partner and leader of Schiff Hardin’s white-collar crime, international investigations and corporate compliance group.

In the past those people working in the U.S. and state’s attorney’s offices or those sitting on the bench never considered working at a large firm, Holmes said. During the last 10 years, she’s seen an increase in the number of these types of lawyers who are heading to large firms.

She worked in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, tried 26 federal trials in the U.S. attorney’s office, was chief assistant corporation counsel for the City of Chicago, and spent about nine years as an associate Cook County circuit court judge.

Having strong trial experience in a law-firm setting today means a white-collar lawyer doesn’t need to litigate the other side “to death with paper” because he or she is not afraid to go to trial because they’ve done it so many times, she said.

“When [law firms] started to see companies get prosecuted more and their own clients needing that sort of representation, they didn’t have people with that particular background,” Holmes said. “They had to bring in people because the business started to boom. Now we are seeing the white-collar practice grow tremendously. We’ve got several associates who are now declaring ‘white collar’ as their specialty.”

Areas of focus

Connelly, of Mayer Brown, said matters related to the FCPA and securities law violations have dramatically increased because of the Enron scandal and the fallen economy.

Cyclic swings occur with the change of the presidential administration from one party to another. President Obama’s administration is more aggressive in its watchdog efforts, he said.

Soffer, from Katten, said he regularly handles internal investigations for clients. They want to show government investigators that they take compliance efforts seriously. An internal investigation may come after, for example, a whistle-blower makes a claim. The legal team will conduct interviews and review documents and e-mails. They want their lawyers to handle it economically, but thoroughly.

“I’ve had one-day investigations, and I’ve had yearlong investigations,” he said. “Investigations can take three quick interviews and confessions, and others involve reviews of literally millions of documents. … Investigations have become more complex, particularly with the advent of technology and e-mail and electronic documents.”

Pat Brady, a partner in Barnes & Thornburg’s white-collar practice and a former federal and state financial crimes prosecutor, said he handles many kinds of financial matters.

His clients often deal with a “regulatory alphabet soup” and want a more business-savvy approach.

Brady said his clients rely on him to understand how their business works and guide them through that maze of regulations.

Clients like using the firm’s white-collar mind-set to do due diligence on overseas matters, Brady said.

“The increase in the regulatory scrutiny of organizations doing business overseas started in about 1999, when the global economic community adopted a series of conventions,” he said. “Fast-forward to the 2001 meltdown in Enron and 9/11 and then you had Sarbanes-Oxley, so it was kind of a perfect storm.”

“Whether or not they have a problem they have to know if they have a problem,” Brady said.

Mark Filip, a partner in Kirkland’s litigation and corporate governance and counseling practices, said some of the best lawyering against or involving the government involves investigating a matter and getting any issue resolved before it becomes public.

At the beginning a company doesn’t know if the problem they are dealing with is a white-collar matter, Filip said.

It is more of a regulatory issue that has a lot of components to it. It may be an issue that intersects with the board of directors or the SEC, or it may have a regulatory component that involves the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Health and Human Services, he said.

Several specific thrusts of government activity have led to more white-collar business for large law firms, said Filip, who was deputy U.S. attorney general in the Department of Justice before moving to Kirkland. Health care prosecution started to increase about 10 years ago. Several Fortune-50 pharmaceutical companies have faced large multibillion-dollar cases. Other thrusts of focus include environmental and export/import regulation.

Six years ago there were a handful of FCPA cases in the United States, but there were two in the last six months of his tenure at the Justice Department, he said.

“I really think that the level of regulation and compliance focus in America is such that you really have to think about it in terms of a spectrum of regulatory issues that at the extreme can become white-collar concerns,” Filip said.

“Depending on how the facts play out they can verge into the criminal enforcement sphere, and you typically don’t know at the beginning where on the spectrum an issue might wind up.”

Collins, from Perkins Coie, said an economic crisis where investors have lost money creates an anti-Wall Street environment.

This environment forces the government to build up regulatory teams and protect the economy, he said.

“When the government beefs up resources, by definition there is going to be more investigations,” Collins said. “People lost money, banks have failed, business deals have cratered. There is a strong sense that someone did something wrong and someone should pay. That environment is one where litigation becomes a fact of life. …”

Solo View: Collaborative Databases

By: Tanya Witt
The Witt Law Firm
tanya@thewittlawfirm.com

Technology has changed the practice of law and often solo attorneys are leading the change. Because of their small size, solo attorneys and small firms can react quickly when new technologies surface. Because only one attorney has to approve its use, solo attorneys are frequently the first to implement emerging technology into their practices. One type of emerging technology is secure, online, collaborative databases.

These collaborative databases offer important advantages over previous methods of transmitting and sharing information with clients and others outside the firm.

E-mail, if unencrypted, lacks security and data integrity. Many, if not most, people are still using unencrypted e-mail because establishing and using an encrypted e-mail exchange can be too complex for most users. Fax machines are not an ideal method of sharing and transmitting data due to legibility issues. Have you ever tried to read a fax of a fax of a fax? U.S. mail and even the large express delivery services do not provide the security and instantaneous exchange of information offered by collaborative databases.

Collaborative databases allow attorneys to practice from anywhere they can access the Internet. If an attorney is in court or at a closing, she may communicate with a client and work on a file without the compromised security and privacy of a cell phone conversation or an unencrypted e-mail or a text message. Collaborative databases offer a secure portal that can be accessed by multiple users from multiple networks. After a secure login, users can upload documents, enter relevant deadlines and information, and provide status updates that can be accessed by other approved users. Instead of faxing or e-mailing documents to numerous parties, the documents can be uploaded to the database once and then viewed by all approved parties.

Efficiency is also improved by automatic, instantaneous notifications. The database can be configured to send an e-mail message automatically to notify relevant parties that there has been an update on the database, eliminating the need for routine status update calls or letters. Users can access and update the database 24/7. The database eliminates the need for attorneys and their clients to engage in “phone tag” just to share information and updates, and the need for attorneys to draft and transmit letters or e-mails to their clients. Collaborative databases allow files to be easily backed up. Backing up the database only requires additional hard drive space that is usually available for an almost negligible incremental cost.

The accuracy of information sharing can be improved with the use of collaborative databases. Because a client can enter his information directly into the database, there is no risk that the attorney or staff member incorrectly entered the information. Accuracy is improved by allowing a client to enter his information directly.

From a cost perspective, a client can realize cost savings by entering information such as dates, facts, witnesses’ names, and uploading documents herself instead of paying an attorney or legal assistant to collect and enter that information.

Lastly, there may be a synergy or camaraderie that develops when clients and attorneys collaborate and share information through a mutually accessible database. The client and attorney may feel a stronger sense of teamwork when both can add content and ideas into a shared database.

Collaborative databases can be limited to certain aspects of representation or leveraged for a completely virtual law office. An example of limited use is attorneys who use these tools only to record their time, bill and collect payment from clients. When fully leveraged, collaborative databases allow attorneys to provide legal services without the need to meet clients in person. By removing or reducing the need for face-to-face client meetings, attorneys may represent clients from a much larger geographic area, eliminate the environmental impact caused when attorneys and clients commute to offices to meet each other or use overnight carriers to deliver documents to each other, and realize cost savings.

There are several providers of collaborative databases for attorneys. Virtual Law Office Technology, LLC, which abbreviates its name as VLOTech, is a web-based Software as a Service (SaaS) application. Its service is offered over the Internet rather than via downloading or installing any software. According to VLOTech’s website, the software serves as an attorney’s law office, handling administrative and management tasks, as well as communication with the client.

Some attorneys hire technology consultants to create a custom collaborative database for their use. One attorney recently hired consultants to create a custom database because he had a specific goal, namely bidirectional file and message access in a secure, digital format that would be user-friendly for clients who are not too technologically advanced.

Attorneys who are interested in collaborative databases should research the third-party hosting company, especially the company’s data return and retention policies. They should educate themselves on the different ethics and malpractice concerns associated with this form of law practice management.

Tuning In: Prime-time legal entertainment

By Susie Spies Roth

Susie Spies Roth clerked for Judge Kenneth F. Ripple on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and then spent two years as an associate in Sidley Austin’s general litigation department. As of Aug. 31, Susie has joined the clinical faculty at Northwestern University School of Law as the director of academic and professional excellence.

“The Good Wife,” a new drama starring Julianna Margulies and Chris Noth set to premiere Sept. 22 on CBS, is nothing short of good old-fashioned prime-time legal entertainment.

By “prime-time legal entertainment,” I mean that it will air during prime time, that its subject matter is based loosely on the practice of law, and that it is exceedingly entertaining. To be clear, I do not mean to imply that the “legal” aspect of the show has any basis whatsoever to the reality I have experienced as a young associate at a large Chicago law firm.

Frankly, I can’t imagine that television programming detailing my day-to-day existence at my law firm would attract viewers. I certainly enjoy my work, and occasionally get a giggle from e-mail I draft to fellow associates and partners, but I am quite sure my potentially humorous e-mail would not convince a television audience to come back for seconds.

“The Good Wife,” however, certainly does. This is the beauty of prime-time television. Prime time does not have to slavishly adhere to “reality” and “rules” and “ethics” and “social mores.”

“The Good Wife” is, essentially, a compilation of all of the themes recently deemed to interest the viewing public: government officials doubling as prostitute-hiring philanderers, “Survivor”-esque reality television shows, love, sex, intrigue, failure, success, pompous young men, even more pompous older women, and irritating mothers-in-law.

The fact that no law firms (of which I’m aware — even during these trying economic times) actually engage in a six-month “trial” period for associates, where one associate will eventually be kicked off the island and sent packing and the other stays on, is of no consequence.

As a viewer, you will be on the edge of your seat rooting for Margulies’s Alicia Florrick, who is skyrocketed back into the practice of law after a protracted absence when her husband is convicted of using government funds to finance his sexual escapades. On her first day at the firm, she meets Cary, the young arrogant Harvard grad who coolly informs her, “May the best man win.” You will eagerly watch her annihilate him over the course of the show’s first season, and watch proudly as she gets that final rose in the rose ceremony (She’ll do it! I know it!).

You will add the show to your TiVo queue, and you will look forward to watching the week’s developments while you eat carry-out after a long day at work.

You will enjoy watching a television show that mirrors the actual practice of law just enough to allow you to chuckle when Alicia, during her first trial (which, obviously, takes place during her first week at work), objects to one of the prosecution’s questions on direct examination.

The judge asks her to provide a basis for her objection.

She quickly searches her brain, reaching back to her days at Georgetown Law, and timidly tries “hearsay?” to which the judge immediately responds “overruled.” You chuckle, because you know the proper objection was “relevance.”

At least you think it was. Because you learned that in your evidence class, and you remember, because evidence was an intriguing and challenging course.

You also realize that evidence in practice bears little resemblance to the neatly constructed fact patterns you remember fondly from your evidence exam. [Aside: I do remember my evidence exam fondly; in fact, I remember all of my law school exams fondly, which most would say makes me “weird,” but I maintain simply makes me a law nerd.]

But it doesn’t matter, because your inner law nerd likes to hear people make evidentiary objections on prime-time television, and enjoys that most viewers have no idea what hearsay even means.

You wonder what will happen with Alicia and her jailbird husband, and you hope that she’ll find true, prostitute-free love with her old law school buddy, a partner at her new firm.

You beam during her trial as she manages to find a glitch in the testimony of the prosecution’s lead witness that rises to the “My Cousin Vinny”-echelon of grits-based lawyering. I audibly cheered during the scene, so proud I was of my fellow female litigator.

At the end of it all, you wonder whether you are, in fact, a good wife, or a good boyfriend, or a good partner. And despite the fact that the lawyering in the show is really nothing like the lawyering you do every day at work, you hope that you are, if nothing else, a good lawyer.

You think back fondly on your first day of law school, or the first motion you argued, or your first trial, and you know, on some level, that you are. Or, at the very least, that you could play one on TV.

“The Good Wife”

Set to premiere at 9 p.m. Sept. 22 on CBS.

Rating: 3 GAVEL

Chicago Bar Foundation Mini Golf Outing - Summer 2009

The Chicago Bar Foundation hosted their annual Mini Golf outing at Millenium Park.  The Chicago Lawyer Network also took part in the event.  Here are some photos for what turned out to be a perfect night for golf in beautiful surroundings.  Many new connections were made through this networking event.

Click on the photo to view the caption.

Social Scene: Chicago Lawyer Network’s Speed Networking Night

Dozens of top lawyers turned out Tuesday, March 3, at Tizi Melloul Mediterranean Restaurant and Lounge for the Chicago Lawyer Network’s second speed networking evening. After some time to mix and unwind, participants sat down for the networking session. Modeled on speed dating, the networking portion of the event gave people a few minutes to talk about their law practices, and then half the participants would move along to the next table to chat with someone new. Visit this link to join the Chicago Lawyer Network.

—Photos by Colleen O’Brien

Past President\’s Dinner

Title: Past President\’s Dinner
Location: Villa Verone Restaurant Geneva
Description: Sponsor: Kane County Bar Association
Info: 630-762-1915; fax: 630-762-9395

Start Time: 17:45
Date: 2009-02-12

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