Ropes Gray has settled a two-year-old discrimination lawsuit brought by former partner Patricia Martone, who claimed Ropes management routinely passed her clients off to younger male partners and unfairly pushed her out of the firm.

In a one-page stipulation filed Thursday in New York federal district court, Ropes and Martone, 65, agreed that all claims and counterclaims tied to the dispute “are hereby withdrawn” and “dismissed in their entirety, with prejudice,” with neither side having to pay the other’s attorneys’ fees.

“This matter has been settled,” a Ropes spokesman said in a statement. “Ropes Gray wishes Pat Martone well.”

The resolution comes seven weeks after Ropes counsel Bettina Plevan, a labor and employment partner at Proskauer Rose, argued that the suit should be thrown out on summary judgment.

At the March 27 hearing before U.S. District Judge John Koeltl, Plevan argued that the firm fired Martone in the fall of 2010 because it no longer made economic sense to keep her, not because it was discriminating or retaliating against her.

Martone’s dismissal came just months after she approached Ropes to complain about what she deemed discriminatory behavior. In response, Ropes hired O’Melveny Myers to investigate Martone’s complaints. The O’Melveny inquiry found that Ropes had not discriminated against Martone and that the economics of her practice were “unsustainable.” Ropes chairman R. Bradford Malt informed Martone of the investigation’s results during the fall of 2010 meeting and fired her on the spot.

Martone’s lawyer, Anne Vladeck of Vladeck, Waldman, Elias Engelhard, countered at the March summary judgment hearing that “age permeates all decisions” at Ropes and that by firing her client, the firm had reduced the retirement benefits to which she would have been entitled had she remained with the partnership for two more years. 

Martone, an Asia-focused patent litigator who joined Morrison Foerster after leaving Ropes, did not immediately return a request for comment. Vladeck said only that the case settled and that they wish Ropes Gray well. Plevan did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

A browser or device that allows javascript is required to view this content.

Article source: Article Source

The post Ropes Settles Age Discrimination Suit With Ex-Partner appeared first on .

In Part I of this series, I explored the possibility that a key metric—average partner profits—has lost much of its value as a measurement of anything meaningful about big law firms. Within equity partnerships of eat-what-you-kill firms, the explosive growth of top-to-bottom spreads has skewed the distribution of income away from the bell-shaped curve that underpins the statistical validity of any average.

Part II considers the implications of that shift.

Searching for Explanations Beyond the Obvious

In recent years, equity partners at the top of the pyramid in most big firms have engineered a massive redistribution of income in their favor. Why? The next time a senior partner talks about holding the line on equity partner head count or reducing entry-level partner compensation as a way of strengthening the partnership, consider the source and scrutinize the claim.

One popular assertion is that the high end of the internal equity partner income gap attracts lateral partners. In fact, some firms boast about their large spreads because they hope it will entice laterals. But with his recent analysis, Professor William Henderson demonstrated that lateral hiring typically doesn’t enhance a firm’s profits, though selective lateral hiring does sometimes works. But infrequent success doesn’t make aggressive and indiscriminate lateral hiring to enhance top line revenues a wise business plan.

According to Citi’s 2012 Law Firm Leaders Survey as cited in the 2013 Citi-Hildebrandt Client Advisory, even law firm managing partners acknowledge that, financially, almost half of all lateral hires turn out to be no better than a break-even proposition. If leaders are willing to admit that this practice has a failure rate approaching 50 percent, imagine how bad the reality must actually be. Even worse, the non-financial implications for the acquiring firm’s culture can be devastating, but there’s no metric for assessing those untoward consequences.

A related argument is that without the high end of the range, legacy partners will leave. Firm leaders should consider resisting such threats. Even if such partners aren’t bluffing, it may be wiser to let them go.

“We’re Helping Young Attorneys and Building a Future”

Among the other supposed benefits of recruiting rainmakers at the high end of a firm’s internal partner income distribution: the supposedly new opportunities that they can provide to younger attorneys. But the 2013 Citi-Hildebrandt Client Advisory [PDF] shows that lateral partner hiring comes at the expense of associate promotions from within. Homegrown talent is losing the equity partner race to outsiders.

In a similar attempt to spin another current trend as beneficial to young lawyers, some managing partners assert that lower reduced equity partner compensation levels lower the bar for admission, making equity status easier to attain. Someone under consideration for promotion can more persuasively make the business case (i.e., that potential partner’s client billings) required for equity participation.

Such sophistry assumes that an economic test makes any sense for most young partners in today’s big firms. In fact, it never did. But now the prevailing model incentivizes senior partners to hoard billings, preserve their own positions, and build client silos—just in case they someday find themselves searching for a better deal elsewhere in the overheated lateral market.

Finally, senior leaders urge that current growth strategies will better position their firms for the future. Such appealing rhetoric is difficult to reconcile with many partners’ contradictory behavior: guarding client silos, pulling up the equity partner ladder, reducing entry level partner compensation, and making it increasingly difficult for homegrown talent ever to reach the rarified profit participation levels of today’s managing partners.

A browser or device that allows javascript is required to view this content.

Continue reading

Subscribe to The Am Law Daily

You must be signed in to comment on an article

Article source: Article Source

The post Ugliness Inside the Am Law 100—Part II appeared first on .

Like many lawyers, Glenn Colton is a baseball fan.

But the Dentons white-collar and government investigations practice chair has taken his love for America’s national pastime to the next level, scoring his own fantasy baseball column for NBC Sports’s Rotoworld and SiriusXM radio show called Colton and The Wolfman.

On June 13, Colton will be inducted into the Fantasy Sports Trade Association’s Hall of Fame during a ceremony at the DoubleTree Hotel in downtown Chicago. It marks the end of a long journey that began in the late 1980s when Colton joined his first fantasy baseball league while attending New York University School of Law.

Colton, 48, says that the group of would-be lawyers had trouble agreeing on whether their inaugural fantasy baseball foray would use players from only the American League or National League. “We had a bunch of Mets and Yankee fans who wanted to play,” recalls Colton, noting that the subsequent settlement involved using the old eastern divisions of both leagues.

Major League Baseball has since realigned its divisions, but the old tiers live on in Colton’s first fantasy league, in which his son, Bobby, now also owns a franchise. (For the uninitiated, fantasy sports involve participants creating fake teams with real players—and no, it’s not gambling, but more on that below.)

But Colton’s big break into the business of fantasy sports came 11 years ago when a college friend, Rick Wolf, a founding FSTA board member and former head of digital at NBC Sports, suggested they partner up for a team in the League of Alternative Baseball Reality, one of the first leagues for fantasy sports experts.

“I remember driving down [for the draft] with Rick to USA Today’s headquarters in McLean, Virginia,” says Colton, a die-hard Yankee fan whose favorite player is Mariano Rivera. “There were some real industry titans there—guys like Ron Shandler and John Hunt—but we ended up winning our first year in the league.”

The Colton-Wolf partnership continued the following season, as the two traveled to Phoenix for another LABR draft. They won that year as well, proving that the duo’s fantasy baseball acumen was no fluke. As Wolf became more involved in the growing fantasy sports industry—now worth up to $4.5 billion a year, according to Harvard Business School—Colton began writing for Rotoworld in 2003 and soon found ways to incorporate his hobby into his practice.

In 2005, a St. Louis-based provider of fantasy baseball games sued the media arm of Major League Baseball in federal court, claiming that it was unable to obtain a license allowing it to use the names of real MLB players on its website. The company, CBC Distribution and Marketing, argued it had a First Amendment right to those names.

The Major League Baseball Players Association and other sports leagues and unions soon voiced their support for MLB’s position, and the case became a crucial test for the future of the fantasy sports industry, as profit margins would undoubtedly change if companies seeking to market their games were forced to pay steep licensing fees to professional sports leagues.

But a U.S. district court found in favor of CBC in 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit upheld that decision the following year, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied an appeal by MLB in 2008, according to our previous reports. Colton, who wrote an amicus brief on behalf of the FSTA, worked closely with CBC’s lawyers from St. Louis IP shop Harness, Dickey Pierce and law professor Neil Richards.

“It really was a watershed moment for the fantasy sports industry,” Colton says. “The outcome of that case solidified the business plan, so you began seeing investments and MA opportunities that weren’t there before.”

Colton’s work for the FSTA has opened doors for Dentons to provide contracts, IP, and licensing counsel to companies in the fantasy sports industry. The next challenge facing the business is guarding the “safe harbor” provision it currently enjoys from the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006. Colton has publicly challenged those claiming that fantasy sports are merely legalized gambling, arguing instead that they are games of skill. (The New York Times recently reported on the increasingly blurred line between some forms of fantasy games and gambling.)

“I always like to say that in chess, which most would consider the ultimate game of skill, black loses to white 56 percent of the time,” says Colton, who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan.

He began his career in private practice in 2004 by joining Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati, according to sibling publication the New York Law Journal. In early 2009, Colton left the firm to become white-collar chair at Sonnenschein Nath Rosenthal, which after merging with British firm Denton Wilde Sapte in 2010 and inking a three-way tie-up last year with shops in Canada and Europe is now known as Dentons.

Dentons itself is now looking to new horizons like Latin America, which would give Colton ample scouting opportunities for the next generation of MLB talent. Colton says he’s frequently asked by colleagues, clients, and friends of clients to provide pro bono counsel about the state of their various fantasy teams.

But balancing baseball—and football, which Colton also covers when the MLB season begins to wind down—with his robust litigation practice hasn’t been too tough a challenge.

“Fantasy sports is usually the first and last thing I’ll do each day, with an occasional peek during the day,” says Colton, who tapes his three-hour radio show with Wolf once a week on Tuesday nights. “I like to comb through the box scores each morning as I have my coffee. And I only tweet about baseball and football, not the law.”

Colton credits his training as a litigator with helping him speak extemporaneously on air—besides his weekly radio show, the Dentons partner joined his National Fantasy Baseball Championship teammate Nate Ravitz on ESPN’s popular Fantasy Focus baseball podcast this week—and he’s quick to note that the fantasy sports industry is home to other lawyers like Rotowire’s Jeff Erickson and Chris Liss.

Fantasy baseball addicts also depend on the work of other lawyers-turned-baseball writers like former Keker Van Nest partner Wendy Thurm, who writes for Fangraphs, and NBC Sports lead baseball blogger Craig Calcaterra, who has we’ve previously reported was once an associate at Squire Sanders and Thompson Hine.

Asked about his picks for future success as the MLB season heads towards summer, Colton suggests targeting underperforming hitters, rather than pitchers, in order to maximize market inefficiencies.

Covington Helps U.S. Open Head to ESPN

Covington Burling’s high-profile sports practice might have lost out in inking a record-setting purchase of the National Basketball Association’s Sacramento Kings this week, but the firm snagged more than a consolation prize.

Douglas Gibson, a Covington corporate partner and leading sports dealmaker, led a team from the firm advising the United States Tennis Association on a new 11-year, $770 million contract with ESPN for exclusive broadcast rights to the annual U.S. Open Tennis Championship in New York.

The deal, which begins in 2015 and also includes rights to a number of summer hard-court matches leading up to the tournament, marks the first time in nearly a half-century that the U.S. Open will not appear on CBS. The U.S. Open is one of four Grand Slam finals that make up the top events in pro tennis worldwide.

Gibson says that Covington has represented the White Plains, New York–based USTA for a number of years, handling its last television and digital media agreement with ESPN and the Tennis Channel in 2008. That deal saw both networks partner with CBS in televising certain U.S. Open matches, with the most popular ones, including the finals, appearing on the so-called “Tiffany network.”

Under the terms of the deal agreed upon this week, two years from now ESPN will own all broadcasts rights, along with some smaller matches that will be continue to be shown by the Tennis Channel. The transaction came together rather quickly, says Gibson, although he declined to comment on its particulars.

Dan Malasky, general counsel for player development at the USTA, had a lead role in the negotiations with ESPN. The USTA’s general counsel is Andrea Hirsch, who joined the national U.S. governing body for tennis back in 2008. A 2011 tax filing by the USTA shows that Hirsch received $718,247 in compensation for her work on behalf of the registered nonprofit.

Former King Spalding senior partner Gordon Smith, who joined the USTA as its executive director and COO in November 2007, was paid more than $1.5 million in 2011, according to tax records. Another $26,000 was paid to Jon Vegosen, a founding partner of Chicago’s Funkhouser Vegosen Liebman Dunn, and past president of the USTA. (In another legal link, the father of tennis legend John McEnroe Jr. and USTA general manager for player development Patrick McEnroe is Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton Garrison of counsel John McEnroe Sr., who once sought to become head of the ATP Tour.)

ESPN handled its part of the U.S. Open deal in-house through assistant chief counsel Lisa Stancati. Earlier this month another team led by ESPN senior director and principal counsel David Mayer helped the Bristol, Connecticut–based sports and entertainment giant forge an agreement for a new sports network with the Southeastern Conference, according to our previous reports.

As for Covington, the firm is continuing to advise a deep-pocketed investor group in Seattle led by hedge fund manager Christopher Hansen and Microsoft CEO Steven Ballmer that is on the prowl for a pro sports team to fill a proposed $490 million arena slated for construction in the Emerald City.

Around the Horn

—After months of uncertainty about their future, the NBA’s Kings reached a deal Friday to remain in California’s capital. The Sacramento Bee reports that the team’s embattled ownership—advised by Milbank, Tweed, Hadley McCloy—has reached a record-setting $535 million deal to sell the franchise to a local investor group led by software executive Vivek Ranadive, who is being represented by Katten Muchin Rosenman, according to our previous reports.

—While the Kings ownership situation has gained a measure of clarity, an element of opacity surrounds that of the National Football League’s Cleveland Browns. Last summer four Am Law 100 firms grabbed roles on the $1 billion sale of the franchise to truck stop magnate Jimmy Haslam III. But Haslam, who spoke this week at an industry conference in Indianapolis held by Scopelitis, Garvin, Light, Hanson Feary, has since come under fire for being implicated in an FBI corruption probe involving his company, Pilot Flying J. Haslam has apologized to Browns fans and hired Steptoe Johnson’s Reid Weingarten to conduct an independent probe of the allegations.

—The New Yorker reported this month that sports memorabilia might be a new safe haven for investors looking to park their cash in areas shielded from the increasingly volatile capital markets. But don’t tell that to Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant or the family of the late Mickey Mantle, the latter of which hired Bracewell Giuliani to threaten legal action against an auctioneer claiming to possess a corked bat by the Hall of Famer. As for Bryant, he’s hired Loeb Loeb for a suit against another auctioneer seeking to sell off his high school mementos that were donated by the future Hall of Famer’s mother. This week a federal judge in New Jersey set a June 17 trial date in the dispute.

A browser or device that allows javascript is required to view this content.

Article source: Article Source

The post The Score: Dentons Partner Doubles as Fantasy Sports Pro appeared first on .

Font Size:

BynbspBrian BaxterContactAll Articles

Article source: Article Source

The post Kirkland Cleans Up on PE Shop’s $1.4 Billion Buy appeared first on .

Earlier this year, while standing before a group of 100 men imprisoned at Polk Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C., I was struck by the remarkable full-circle opportunity ALM (the parent company and publisher of The Am Law Daily), through its support of Equal Justice Works, has provided me—the son of a man imprisoned at Polk three decades ago who now advocates on behalf of similarly situated men and the 1.6 million other North Carolinians with criminal records.

The young men gathered in front of me, all of them between the ages of 19 and 25, were participants in a transition seminar because each was due to be released within the next six months. Deprived of freedom but not the audacity of youth, a handful of them shared with me their plans to return to school, start businesses, and otherwise provide for the needs of their families. Understandably, they assumed they would leave behind the worst consequences of their criminal records as soon as they were free of Polk’s bars and barbed wire.

Unfortunately, the reality they face does not match their optimism. Upon being released from prison with their debts to society paid, most of those young men will not receive the restorative opportunities they deserve. Instead, after being denied the privileges, opportunities, and resources essential to productive citizenship, approximately half of them will eventually be re-incarcerated. Many of those who remain free will live in destitution.

Few of the men—and few of those who occupy statehouses around the country—truly understand the degree to which criminal records serve as modern-day scarlet letters that trigger hundreds of state and federal civil disabilities. Indeed, these soon-to-be-free men, like approximately 65 million Americans, will be designated as second-class citizens, vulnerable to private discrimination and communal exclusion. Isolation from gainful employment, affordable housing, public assistance, and a host of other resources and opportunities are the far-reaching “collateral consequences” of criminal records that often do more harm than one’s criminal sentence.

Looking out into that crowd of youthful faces and recognizing the gulf between their optimism and the reality that awaits, I felt—perhaps more fully than at any other point in my project—the profound cruelty and urgency of this problem.

I thought about Luther, my first client, who was charged with a nonviolent felony at the age of 17. It was his first brush with the law, and he was advised that if he pled guilty to the charge he would serve just a few months in prison. Not once was Luther warned about the collateral consequences that would likely flow from that conviction. Thinking himself fortunate to have avoided a lengthier sentence, he accepted the deal and served his six months.

Almost 20 years since that lone criminal conviction, Luther describes his life since release—branded a felon and denied job after job—as “still serving time.”

Standing before those young men at Polk, my thoughts and words were not all doom and gloom. In 2012, my colleagues at the North Carolina Justice Center and the partner organizations of the NC Second Chance Alliance (ncsecondchance.org) secured several new resources that would provide relief to some of them.

I informed the young men that it is now possible to expunge first-time nonviolent felonies and obtain certificates of relief from the collateral consequences of criminal convictions. I described a pilot network of local reentry councils and a state reentry advisory council intended to coordinate the delivery of reentry resources to the newly freed. I also explained the growing availability of pro bono legal services for veterans and other low-income individuals confronting the collateral consequences of criminal records.

These newly created tools of relief are not nearly enough to fully counteract the collateral damage that convictions for even nonviolent offenses can do, but I am proud of the contributions I have been able to make to each of these efforts for both the immediate relief they will provide to some individuals—Luther, for example, is now eligible for an expungement of his nonviolent felony conviction— and the broader progress they demonstrate.

I ended that day at Polk by briefly speaking about my father’s successful reentry journey, which began with his release from the same prison in 1986. I provided enough details about my father’s journey to demonstrate that there were plenty of times when it would have been easier—more reasonable even—for him to recidivate and only his absolute resolve to always be there for our family prevented him from doing so. The payoff for his resolve was not that he became rich or even financially comfortable —he is neither. The payoff was that he was always there for me and others who were invested in him. And while I did not appreciate his strength as a child and teenager, I realize now that each of my own opportunities and accomplishments are founded in his strength.

I sincerely hope that hearing details of my family’s reentry experience helped some of those young men sharpen their focus on the individuals in their own lives who are invested in their successful reentry and will at some point appreciate their perseverance in the face of daunting barriers.

Not all of my days are as eventful or pensive as my day spent at Polk, but each offers the promise of progress—and I will always be grateful to ALM and Equal Justice Works for trusting me with this position at the outset of my career. For the rest of my fellowship and in my career beyond, I hope to express this gratitude through my continued advocacy on behalf of those who are more than the sum of their worst mistakes and who deserve opportunities to prove it.

Daniel Bowes is a 2011-2013 Equal Justice Works Fellow advocating on behalf of low-income North Carolinians with criminal records. He is one of two EJW Fellows currently sponsored by ALM. He is a 2011 graduate of New York University School of Law where he was a Root-Tilden-Kern Public Interest Scholar.

A browser or device that allows javascript is required to view this content.

Article source: Article Source

The post First Person: Working to Help Others Leave Crime Behind appeared first on .

Ropes counsel Ryan Malone

As Ropes Gray counsel Ryan Malone got out of a cab and headed into the Washington, D.C., office of a client for a meeting on May 8, he felt his phone buzz. The call, it turned out, was one he’d been hoping to get since joining the firm in 2001 as a summer associate.

The caller was Ropes associate Michael Laufert, and he had news about a major development in a long-running pro bono case the two lawyers were working on: A Maryland state court judge, whose order had just arrived in the mail, had vacated firm client John Huffington’s convictions for committing a pair of 1981 murders. After more than 30 years in prison, Huffington might soon be a free man.

For Malone, a white-collar litigator based in D.C., the order validated 12 years of work on an assignment he took on even before graduating from University of Virginia School of Law and becoming a Ropes associate in 2002. “I’m the one who has been leading this now for a long time,” says Malone, who talks on the phone at least once a week with the now-50-year-old Huffington. “It’s become quite personal.”

Pro bono work on the case originated with David Stewart, a trial and appellate lawyer who sought it out in the mid-1980s while at now-defunct Miller, Cassidy, Larroca Lewin to feed a desire to tackle a death penalty case. By 1988, Stewart had succeeded in having Huffington’s death sentence commuted to life in prison, and he brought the case with him when he moved to Ropes the following year. The firm has worked to clear Huffington’s name ever since.

In last week’s order, Frederick County Circuit Court Judge G. Edward Dwyer Jr.—who presided over the 1983 trial that ended with a jury convicting Huffington on two counts of murder—granted the petition for a writ of actual innocence the Ropes lawyers had filed on their client’s behalf in a maneuver made possible by a 2009 Maryland law allowing defendants to present fresh exculpatory evidence to reverse prior convictions. The Ropes team argued in its November 2010 petition that Huffington had been convicted of killing Joseph Hudson and Diane Becker, who were stabbed and shot to death following an apparently botched cocaine deal, based on faulty scientific evidence presented at trial by the FBI. In siding with the petitioners and granting the writ, Dwyer also vacated Huffington’s convictions and ordered a new trial.

According to Dwyer’s ruling, the convictions relied heavily on two pieces of forensic evidence: bullets found at three locations that an FBI expert testified had come from the same box, which was used to tie Huffington to the scene of Hudson’s murder, and hairs found on the bed where Becker was slain that prosecutors said were “indistinguishable” from those on Huffington’s head. In the years since Huffington’s conviction, courts have ruled in other cases that the methods used to draw both conclusions are scientifically invalid.

The Ropes lawyers supplemented their petition in late 2011 after learning that the FBI had commissioned a report in 1999 that discredited agent Michael Malone, who presented the hair analysis at Huffington’s trial, as using methods that were flawed and unreliable. Ryan Malone, no related to the discredited FBI agent, says he learned of the FBI’s report from a Washington Post reporter who wrote a 2012 story questioning why the FBI had failed to notify defendants and their counsel about the extensive doubts about Michael Malone’s methods.

Dwyer concluded in his order that “there is a significant possibility that the outcome of [Huffington's] case may have been different had the State not utilized the microscopic hair analysis evidence and Agent Malone’s testimony.” Ryan Malone augmented the petition further in March by submitting DNA evidence showing that the hair found on Becker’s bed did not belong to Huffington.

Hartford County, Maryland state’s attorney Joseph Cassilly said Wednesday that his office has already asked Dwyer to reconsider the order, and has also appealed the decision. “I think the state’s going to prevail,” says Cassilly, who has prosecuted the case since its inception. And if Dwyer’s order stands? “We’ll try it again.” Even without the hair and bullet evidence, he insists, the state has a strong case. “The evidence against Huffington was, is, and always has been very convincing and overwhelming evidence.”

Malone says the case—like his work on a Ropes team that helped free the men known as the West Memphis Three, who were imprisoned for more than 18 years after being found guilty of the alleged ritual killing of three young boys—is a testament to sticking with an assignment “even when there are a lot of setbacks along the way.” (Last July, sibling publication The National Law Journal highlighted Malone’s work on the West Memphis Three case and a series of voter rights cases, pointing to the between 500 hours and 600 hours he spends a year on pro bono work.)

Stewart—the intial lawyer on the case, who retired from the Ropes partnership in 2007—takes a more pessimistic view. “The system is rotten,” he says, pointing to what it took to prove the FBI’s evidence was unreliable. Even so, he says, “It’s wonderful to see justice in this case.”

Malone adds: “When we first moved to test the evidence, the truth has never frightened us. It’s just been a long time for the truth to come out.”

A browser or device that allows javascript is required to view this content.

Article source: Article Source

The post Judge Vacates Ropes Client’s Double Murder Conviction appeared first on .