Lawrence Walsh's Holy Wat
Low, Charlotte
Charlotte Low LAWRENCE WALSH'S HOLY WAR The man who would be Leon Jaworski. mong lawyers it is almost a cliche nowadays to remark how the practice of law has changed from a lofty profession to...
...Circuit ruling is Alexia Morrison's probe of Olson...
...You could theoretically criminalize the entire civil code," says a former prosecutor...
...Other lawyers who worked for Walsh say they had no complaints about him...
...The virtual blank checks once handed over to the great Wall Street law firms to pursue lawsuits with meticulous leisure have been replaced by units of in-house counsel with red pencils going over every hour billed on the outside lawyers' statements...
...Also in New York is another key member of the Walsh team, Audrey Strauss (Columbia), former head of the frauds division at the U.S...
...The press likes to describe their efforts as "painstaking...
...The ruling did not halt any prosecutions under the act, however, and is not likely to do so unless the Supreme Court upholds the D.C...
...To judge from Walsh's moralizing at the ABA prayer breakfast last year, his office seems to be on a manhunt for technical legal violations and, of course, lies...
...Alexia Morrison, an independent counsel investigating former Assistant Attorney General Theodore Olson in alleged Superfund wrongdoing, has also represented Channell...
...The independent counsel send their bills to the Administrative Office of the U.S...
...The federal conspiracy statute, for example, has been interpreted to include conspiracies to commit purely civil wrongs...
...Circuit court overturned Johnson's disqualification order, ruling that neither Allis nor Butler had done anything improper...
...The flagship office in Washington is another story...
...In 1964, he served on the company's board of directors and held a bit of its stock until the Dow acquisition, when he received Dow stock in exchange...
...According to Merrell-Dow, twenty of the cases have gone to trial...
...His first job after graduating from Columbia Law was to spend two years assisting a New York state special prosecutor investigating corruption in the Brooklyn district attorney's office...
...I'm not saying there was anything wrong with what they did, but they definitely had the advantage...
...You can imagine what his partners thought when they saw the kinds of bills he sent out," says the lawyer...
...Walsh's results so far: two convictions (guilty pleas) for conspiracy to commit . . . tax fraud...
...You don't become a partner at Davis Polk because your wife clips coupons," says a lawyer acquaintance...
...The case was originally scheduled to go to trial in October 1981, then rescheduled for early 1983...
...Besides refusing to leave New York, Struve and Strauss have declined to sever their ties with their law firms...
...Eventually, his partners refused to let him handle new cases...
...Their point of origin is, overwhelmingly, New York...
...His lease, signed in June 1987, is for two years, with an option for a third...
...That does not include discovery—deposition transcripts, interrogatories, and the like...
...One of the cases on which Walsh remained until shortly before he became independent counsel was filed in 1980 by the parents of Anne Elisabeth Koller, born without arms and legs in a Washington hospital in 1979...
...It meant that when he got to court, every screw in the machine was in place...
...As of this writing, Morrison has asked that Olson be jailed for contempt of court unless he agrees to waive the statute of limitations in his case pending resolution of the constitutional issue...
...Walsh sublets his space from a major Washington firm, Hogan & Hartson, the building's largest tenant...
...He then went to work for a fellow-Republican, Thomas Dewey, then district attorney for Manhattan...
...if he was demanding, one says, "it was because he demanded the same of himself, and that's what the clients were paying for...
...It concerns a major Davis Polk client, Richardson-Merrell Inc., the pharmaceuticals manufacturer...
...They filed motion after motion...
...worked out of rent-free quarters at the U.S...
...Edward Kennedy) who is Walsh's office administrator...
...He hinted darkly: "Penal statutes dealing with lying and obstruction underline the importance of this concern...
...At that time, only a handful of Bendectin suits were pending...
...Nace says that the minute he became attorney of record after the Los Angeles lawyers left, Walsh's team filed a 400-page motion for summary judgment without trial in Richardson-Merrell's favor, a repeat of a motion it unsuccessfully made years earlier...
...Friedman is the only senior lawyer on Walsh's staff with long, strong ties to Washington...
...He has to decide should I pursue this racketeer or that drug dealer...
...And, according to the Koller team, lawyers for Richardson-Merrell then informed U.S...
...And it could keep costs down...
...Johnson promptly complied, citing not only the Allis visit but an attempt by one of Allis's partners, James Butler, to publicize the case by giving a Washington Post reporter copies of reports he had submitted to the FDA about birth defects that Johnson had ruled were too unreliable to be admissible in court...
...Stein spent "only" $311,848 on Meese in 1984...
...The ordinary prosecutor has to weigh every case against every other one," says the Justice official...
...Circuit has already found meritorious...
...The alleged wrongs tend to run along the dubious lines of conspiracy to violate appropriations amendments, conspiracy to violate arms export reporting rules, conspiracy to violate the Separation of Powers clause of the U.S...
...attorney provides guidance—and accountability, for criminal defense lawyers have avenues of redress through superiors if they believe a client has been leaned on unfairly...
...As of October 31, 1987, the last date for which the government has figures, Charlotte Low is a senior editor of Insight magazine...
...That was in April 1987...
...Walsh (a Columbia man himself, college and law school) seems to be in the process of bringing more than just that old-line Wall Street billing ethos to his current appointment...
...When Nace tried to get a ten-day extension of the ten-day response period, the team objected...
...In the complaint filed in the Washington federal court and in two depositions, the child's mother, Cynthia Koller, said that she had taken Bendectin during the early months of pregnancy...
...Guy Struve and Richard Ford, now on Walsh's independent counsel team, were his top assistants on the Koller case...
...The worst contretemps in the Koller matter, slowing it down for years, came about when Krystyna Janowski, a secretary who worked for plaintiffs' lawyer Nicholas Allis and who was apparently about to be let go, called the offices of Davis Polk in late December 1982 and left messages indicating that she had heard Cynthia Koller say she had not taken Bendectin during the crucial first three months of pregnancy...
...Michael Deaver's perjury conviction may also be in jeopardy...
...He offers a variety of alternatives: appointment of special prosecutors by the attorney general as during Watergate, a presidential appointment subject to Senate confirmation as during Teapot Dome, or a panel of rotating independent counsel...
...While not faulting Walsh or any of the Davis Polk lawyers by name, the appellate court criticized "the tactical use of motions to disqualify counsel in order to delay proceedings, deprive the opposing party of counsel of its choice and harass and embarrass the opponent...
...Walsh's offices occupy about 30,000 square feet of Columbia Square, a glitzy downtown Post-modern building in fashionable pink granite that is universally recognized as Washington's premier office address...
...It wasn't whimsical," says the partner...
...Dewey was famous for his time-consuming, meticulous approach to cases, boasting that his office once examined 200,000 bank deposit slips to make a case against a bootlegger...
...Walsh] wanted them very badly, and he couldn't have gotten them any other way," says Jim Wieghart, the genial former New York Daily News editor (and former aide to Sen...
...So far, Congress has appropriated only $2 million to cover the extra expenses, says a Department of Justice spokesman, which means the overage comes out of the department's $5 billion budget...
...jokes an Iran-contra lawyer...
...Because of a parallel appointment from the Justice Department, Walsh's investigation will remain unaffected even if the Supreme Court goes along with the D.C...
...W alsh is the only independent counsel since the Ethics in Government Act was passed in 1978 to work out of six separate offices coast to coast, and perhaps the only one in the history of federal special prosecution to have more than one base...
...attorney's office, prosecutors say...
...In Washington, which has a 12-story height limit, "skyscrapers" express their grandiosity horizontally...
...Koller had a fraudulent case, but they did so without telling the other side about their communication to the judge, a possible breach of ethics...
...The only live prosecution affected by the D.C...
...Walsh moved to Oklahoma City and served as "of counsel" at Crowe & Donlevy after his retirement from Davis Polk...
...The clients loved it...
...President Reagan expressed doubts about the law's constitutionality even as he was signing a five-year extension of it in December...
...Constitution, Walsh told the breakfasters, "To the extent that concealment and deception play any part in the relationship between the three branches of government, the rule of law and our constitutional structure of government are alike subverted...
...A chain of supervisors all the way up to the U.S...
...The section of the 1978 Ethics in Government Act that removed the Justice Department from supervision of special prosecutors investigating high-level government wrongdoing was ruled unconstitutional on January 22 by a 2-1 decision of the U.S...
...They work with the nine-volume U.S...
...The case went to the Supreme Court...
...In a 7-1 decision in 1985, the high court reversed the appellate court on a technical issue, ruling that orders disqualifying counsel are not appealable until after trial...
...John Keker (Yale), who practices in San Francisco...
...mong lawyers it is almost a cliche nowadays to remark how the practice of law has changed from a lofty profession to strictly a business...
...They've got a motion for everything," says Nace...
...the efforts of the four independent counsel had cost U.S...
...Three years later, William P. Rogers, an old colleague of Walsh's from the Manhattan district attorney's office, succeeded Brownell and invited Walsh to fill the number two slot in the Walsh is a man the Economist once described as "from another age"—that golden Louis Auchincloss era of the great Wall Street law firms, when money was only money, time was only time, and hardly anyone looked at the bills...
...Fortunately, most federal prosecutors lack the time, the money, or the inclination to make arcane crimes out of flimsy leads...
...attorney in Maryland and now an associate at a Richmond, Virginia law firm...
...Eight years after its filing, the Koller suit has yet to be tried...
...Walsh's were the clients every lawyer dreams of...
...W alsh's devil-may-care attitude to- ward time and money would make little difference if he were subject as special prosecutor to some of the constraints of the not-so-special prosecutor...
...Why didn't Struve and Strauss move down to Washington...
...A former American Bar Association president with a distinguished professional resume that includes service as chief negotiator at the Paris peace talks, Walsh spent twenty-two years in two stints, until he neared the mandatory retirement age of 70 in 1981, as a litigator for New York's Davis Polk & Wardwell...
...Moving on to the U.S...
...Residents of California, the Kollers were represented by lawyers in Washington and Miami (another Bendectin suit was pending in Florida) and by the Los Angeles firm of Butler, Jefferson, Dan & Allis which handled most of the trial preparation...
...In four of those, the plaintiffs won substantial damages, including a verdict against the company for $97 million last summer...
...Most of the Walsh full-timers are younger lawyers, some former associates on leave from large firms, others from the U.S...
...But the real question is as much prudential as constitutional—is the sky'sthe-limit Walsh approach the way we want special prosecutors to run their offices...
...Struve is still a Davis Polk partner, while Strauss remains a partner at Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon, another old-line New York firm...
...Financial constraints on him are nil, of course...
...They had paralegals, they had computer backup...
...W alsh, a doctor's son born in Nova Scotia whose family moved to New York City when he was two, made his reputation as a lawyer by developing an obsession for detail and secrecy...
...Merrell-Dow has won rulings in its favor in sixteen of the cases (including a consolidation of about 1,100 claims in Cincinnati), either because the plaintiffs waited too long to file or because, a court found no causal link between the drug and the claimed birth defects...
...Lawyers of clients called into Walsh's office for questioning (his office has conducted more than 1,000 interviews) say the deposition teams typically consist of five to eight lawyers and agents...
...he was paranoid about eavesdropping," says a former Davis Polk associate...
...O ne of Walsh's last cases at Davis Polk, still remembered around the firm as "that ghastly lawsuit," epitomizes the Walsh approach: hard-hitting, immensely time-consuming, and claiming the moral high ground...
...Peter...
...Alternatively, Walsh might follow the precedent he set in the Koller case and stretch out his investigation for years at taxpayer expense without ever returning an indictment...
...Secretaries and the like also come expensive for Walsh's office, because their employment is classified as "temporary...
...One of his actions there was to recommend Potter Stewart for the Supreme Court in 1958...
...Furthermore, regular federal prosecutors don't just comb the U.S...
...Then figure in the psychological pressure any special prosecutor feels to come up with some sort of indictment—lest it appear that after all this time and money he hasn't done his job...
...These constraints are necessary, say prosecutors, because many federal criminal statutes—mail fraud, wire fraud, racketeering, tax fraud—are so broadly drafted they could theoretically encompass a whole range of activities we do not ordinarily think of as criminal...
...Barry Nace, the Washington lawyer who won the $95 million Bendectin verdict and has taken over the Koller case, estimates that he has fifteen grocery boxes full of Koller documents in his office storeroom, most bearing Walsh's name...
...Should special prosecutors be the Brahmins of the political system, hunting down every technical legal violation, turning every moral wrong into a federal crime...
...the manufacturer insists the drug is safe...
...Two or three would be the maximum in an ordinary U.S...
...He would say: 'I want to have that issue [researched] and I want to have it on my desk tomorrow morning,' " says the partner...
...The next move for Walsh and his team was to request that the Completely giving up a partnership in a large New York firm, where middle six-figure incomes are the rule, would put a crimp in the life-style of Walsh's senior attorneys...
...Circuit court...
...It would seem difficult to investigate Washington wrongdoing from 235 miles away...
...Such was the case with far-right fundraiser Carl "Spitz" Channell, one of the two convicted parties in the Iran-contra case...
...Janowski soon had second thoughts...
...Prosecuting is supposed to be a function of the executive branch, not the judiciary or anyone else, Laurence Silberman's majority opinion said...
...In an American Bar Association prayer breakfast homily last August, after the Iran-contra congressional hearings had ended in a standoff with Oliver North but while Walsh's own probe was apparently still only in its early stages, Walsh went into high dudgeon, with pointed references to Moses, the Eighth Commandment ("Thou shalt not bear false witness"), and Ananias and Sapphira, the married couple in the Acts of the Apostles who were struck dead for telling a lie to St...
...The Walsh team's total expenditures, says a Justice Department source, is probably more than $5 million by now...
...Walsh started handling Richardson-Merrell's litigation work soon after rejoining Davis Polk in 1961...
...Courts, which forwards them to the Justice Department,which pays them...
...What this means, mostly, is that the practice of law has gotten more competitive because clients have started scrutinizing the bills...
...For what he has also brought is an assurance of unquestioned moral superiority that only a Wall Street Brahmin could possess...
...As a sample of what the defense was costing Richardson-Merrell, the company reported to the Securities and Exchange Commission that it paid Davis Polk $3.3 million in fees and expenses for Bendectin litigation during 1980...
...Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia...
...After being acquired by Dow Chemical in 1981, the drug division was renamed Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals Inc...
...courthouse in Washington and as of October 31 had spent "only" $842,000 to bring perjury convictions against Michael Deaver...
...The gilt-andmarble atrium at Columbia Square seems to stretch as far as the eye can see...
...The one thing that has happened is that Merrell-Dow—strictly as an efficiency move, it says—has been easing Davis Polk and all attorneys who ever worked for the firm out of all its Bendectin cases...
...Wieghart says the Government Services Administration, not Walsh, found the office space, which is just two Metro stops from the U.S...
...and William Lee (Cornell), who practices in Boston...
...Walsh evidently plans to stay at Columbia Square for some time...
...He has to say to himself, gee, I just can't afford to put another lawyer on this case, because the evidence doesn't look good enough...
...The monthly rent is $80,000, up from $59,000 since Walsh recently expanded into additional space...
...A few days later, Allis, accompanied by his own investigator, visited Janowski and persuaded her to sign a statement under penalty of perjury retracting her allegations and asserting that she knew nothing about when Cynthia Koller took Bendectin...
...At the low end, Independent Counsel Whitney North Seymour, Jr...
...The New York branch of Walsh's office, which includes two secretaries, has been operating rent-free out of a federal building—although it will soon have to find new offices because another federal agency is taking over the space...
...The in-house lawyers, cheaper to hire, do far more of the work themselves these days...
...Self-righteousness seems to go along with the independent counsel's office these days...
...So far, insists Wieghart, no conflicts have arisen for lawyers on Walsh's vast staff, but the potential remains high, and it is one reason why part-time prosecutors are used infrequently in garden-variety cases...
...That leavens the dough of prosecutorial discretion...
...Constitution...
...But a New York lawyer not connected with Davis Polk says the word on Wall Street was that Walsh's torrents of billable hours were a constant source of consternation at his firm, even back in the easygoing, genteel days...
...The D.C...
...A Richardson-Merrell anti-nausea drug, Bendectin, approved by the FDA for morning sickness in 1956, has been the subject of about 1,700 lawsuits in the U.S by women claiming it caused birth defects in their children...
...Because Davis Polk did not then have a Washington office, Walsh and his team set up temporary quarters at the Watergate, renting two entire floors for $85,000 a month...
...Completely giving up a partnership in a large New York firm, where middle six-figure incomes are the rule, would put a crimp in the life-style of Walsh's senior attorneys...
...Such tony law firms as Debevoise & Plimpton of New York and O'Melveny & Myers of Los Angeles have their Washington branches there...
...They had at least twelve lawyers working on the case at various times...
...The slow rate of progress is typical of the 76-year-old Walsh...
...The fact that all senior lawyers on Walsh's staff have retained ties to their private practices could generate conflicts of interest—a private client or employee of a corporate client could turn out to be a key witness or the target of an investigation, or the target of another independent counsel's probe...
...The GSA also converted a conference room into a soundproof, ultra-secure document room...
...Some independent counsel have bravely resisted the temptation to indict—Arthur Christy and Gerald Gallinghouse in the probes of Carter Administration figures, and Jacob Stein in the first Meese investigation, for example...
...As for documents requested by the Walsh team: more than one million pages so far...
...Such practices are hardly unusual at large law firms, where allnighters are a way of life for young attorneys...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 21 Los Angeles law firm be removed from the case on grounds of misconduct...
...All lawyers working full-time in the Iran-contra office make the full $72,500, including Walsh himself...
...T he D.C...
...He is a man the Economist once described as "from another age"—that golden Louis Auchincloss era of the great Wall Street law firms, when money was only money, time was only time, and hardly anyone looked at the bills...
...As a matter of policy, we support the creation of some special mechanism to investigate high-level wrongdoing, but there are ways to do it that are constitutional," says Assistant Attorney General Bolton...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988...
...Part-time work is a financial break for these lawyers, because the top full-time salary for an independent counsel—$72,500, the salary of a U.S...
...You can't expect Walsh to work out of some hellhole in Southeast [Washington]," says a former Justice Department official...
...Meese's actions in this regard were typical of the Reagan Administration's schizophrenia on the independent counsel issue...
...Janowski later recanted that signed statement, virtually on the eve of the trial...
...Circuit's ruling on Janu- .1 ary 22 in the Theodore OlsonSuperfund case held that the independent counsel law violates the separation of powers doctrine because a panel of federal judges, not the President, appoints the independent counsel, and it is almost impossible for the President or the attorney general to have the counsel removed for any reason...
...After a two-year stint at Davis Polk, Walsh returned to Dewey's employment during Dewey's years as governor of New York, putting in six-and seven-day work weeks...
...Walsh and his associates, plus thirty-five FBI agents, eleven IRS agents, and six Customs Service agents, are still grinding away, however, trying to decide whether to launch criminalprosecutions against anyone over the White House's secret arms sales to Iran and the apparent diversion of some of the proceeds to the Nicaraguan contras...
...the part-timers earn pro rata shares of that...
...Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, author of the majority opinion, also expressed concern that disqualification motions could be used as harassment techniques, but said it was the job of the district judge to control the course of litigation...
...Ford started out as a payroll part-timer for the independent counsel's office, but now is "a volunteer," the office says...
...James McKay, leading a second investigation of Meese, also had such an appointment...
...Walsh sounded like a conservative liberals love to love...
...The actual research, of course, was seldom done personally by Walsh...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 attorney general's office...
...The documents on the case take up three entire filing cabinets at the U.S...
...While most of Walsh's staff of eighty-one operates from Washington, D.C., the scene of the presumed Iran-contra crimes, six attorneys are based in New York, including Walsh's right-hand man, Guy Struve (Harvard Law), a top THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988 19 appeals lawyer with a reputation for enormous intelligence who was also Walsh's right-hand man at the litigation department of Davis Polk...
...If he ran up huge bills, he also ran up disproportionate praise...
...He is an extraordinarily careful lawyer who explores every possible contingency in a lawsuit and leaves nothing up to hunch," says a partner at Davis Polk, where Walsh is still fondly known as "Judge Walsh...
...courthouse in Washington: there are thirty-three separate files...
...Dewey, a two-time presidential contender, and Herbert Brownell, President Eisenhower's first attorney general, were the leaders of the Eastern Establishment wing of the Republican party, and Walsh, as might be expected, allied himself with them...
...Walsh led the Davis Polk defense on all Bendectin cases, and stayed on several of them after he left the firm...
...This is not much, comparatively, but it means a few fewer FBI, Drug Enforcement, Bureau of Prisons, and Immigration and Naturalization Service agents...
...His strategy was to leave no stone unturned—nor to allow anyone at the firm who assisted him to leave a stone unturned...
...attorney's office for Southern New York, the most highly regarded prosecutor's office in the country...
...Observers say that he isn't known as the brainiest of lawyers—his reputation at Columbia was mostly in athletics—but he makes up for it in preparation and long hours...
...Lawyers for the women claim Bendectin is unsafe to take during the first trimester of pregnancy...
...or example, the U.S...
...111 "He is an extraordinarily careful lawyer who explores every possible contingency in a lawsuit and leaves nothing up to hunch," says a partner at Davis Polk...
...According to deposition testimony, Richardson-Merrell also found a new apartment for the financially strapped Janowski, rented a car for her, gave her at least $3,000 in expense money, and hired a lawyer for her—the last only after the Davis Polk lawyer had taken a statement from her...
...Circuit decision...
...taxpayers $6.3 million...
...Other part-timers on the Walsh team who have stayed put are John Douglass (Harvard), a former assistant U.S...
...The investigator taped the interview without Janowski's consent...
...More than half that sum ($3.8 million) was spent by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, whose twenty-eight-lawyer office has been investigating the Iran-contra affair since his appointment by a three-judge panel on December 19, 1986...
...Attorney's Manual, a complex set of guidelines that attempts to ensure that prosecutors will pursue only genuine wrongdoers...
...In 1954, at Dewey's urging, Eisenhower made Walsh a federal district judge for Manhattan...
...attorney's office for the District of Columbia handles more than 30,000 cases a year, from petty theft to high treason, with a staff of 204 attorneys...
...The story—denied by Walsh—is that one way his associates pulled their allnighters was in whiting out copy machine flyspecks from Walsh-produced documents...
...His second wife, Mary Alma, whom he married in 1965 after the death of his first wife, is from Oklahoma City...
...But the expense—an extra million here, an extra million there—is not the real problem...
...Add to these a few possible perjury peccadilloes—did 011ie North fudge his time sheets...
...Richard Ford (University of Oklahoma) operates the Oklahoma City branch for the Iran-contra investigation team, headquartered at the offices of Crowe & Donlevy...
...After a handful of initial press encounters, Walsh has regularly declined interviews, and he refuses to let anyone on his staff except Wieghart and his aides talk to the press...
...attorney—is just a little more than what the top New York firms pay their greenest associates...
...codes looking for statutes that might fit the case at hand...
...attorney's office for Southern New York...
...courthouse, and that the fancy Columbia Square quarters were the only ones "that fit many of his requirements...
...All commute to Washington for Iran-contra work...
...Thus, wrote Silberman, the law "seriously weakens constitutional structures that serve to protect individual liberty...
...Back at Davis Polk in 1961, Walsh got the nickname among his opponents of "Killer Walsh," a brilliant, no-compromise trial lawyer...
...It's very hard to read the tea leaves," says Assistant Attorney General John Bolton, the Justice Department's chief critic of the independent counsel law...
...Criminalizing the civil code, and perhaps even the Ten Commandments, lies at the core of the Iran-contra investigation...
...Walsh severed his connections with the Koller case in October 1986...
...Davis Polk promptly sent an investigator and a lawyer to Los Angeles to talk to Janowski...
...The vast space was so that the Walsh quarters could not be bugged...
...Whitney North Seymour even had his own seal made up, just like the Justice Department's, except with the eagle facing in the other direction...
...Davis Polk's litigation department could not be reached for comment on the case...
...With a 142-year history, Davis Polk has a reputation as one of the most prosperous and respected—andstuffiest—old-line law firms in the country, with Harvard Law as its primary feeder school...
...There is one place, however, where the old if-you-have-to-ask-how-much ethic lives on, where the checks are still blank, where the lawyers can spend as much money as they like, and where the equivalent of in-house attorneys are barred from exercising the smallest modicum of control over the cost, much less the direction, of the litigation: the offices of the four independent counsel currently investigating or prosecuting alleged misdoings in Washington...
...There is a much-mourned loss of gentility, as the branches of upstart megafirms like Finley, Kumble, Wagner, Heine, Under-berg, Manley, Myerson & Casey crash together, then drift apart, like ice floes...
...In court papers Olson's lawyer Thomas Martin criticized Morrison for trying to "coerce" Olson into choosing between imprisonment and waiving tig rights—in order, one might add, to pursue an appeal the D.C...
...Clearing the decks of the Butler-Allis firm has done nothing to hasten the progress of the Koller case (Johnson seems to be waiting for the outcome of appeals in other Bendectin cases, and there have been periodic efforts by the plaintiffs to persuade her to recuse herself...
...That would mean some built-in restraints...
...Meanwhile the costs have risen exponentially in the ten years of the Ethics in Government Act...
...Two Washington lawyers, Paul Friedman (SUNY-Buffalo), former president of the District of Columbia Bar, and Geoffrey Stewart (Harvard), also work for Walsh only part-time...
...When you mention twenty-eight prosecutors on one case, the lawyers over there just laugh...
...This might be called the high end of the real estate market for special prosecutors, although it is not atypical: Morrison rents quarters at the Watergate, another upscale Washington address...
...They had the advantage over us," says Allen Eaton, a Washington lawyer who worked on the Koller case in its earlier years...
...High among those was that the offices have thick walls and be completely isolated, which they are, separated from the floor's only other tenant by a wide hallway...
...The results of the suits have been mixed...
...District Judge Norma Johnson in Washington that Mrs...
...What's the word—anal compulsive...
...Hogan & Hartson, his current landlord, is now sole defense counsel of record...
...Ironically, the decision does not apply to Walsh because Meese gave him a parallel appointment in an apparent attempt to appease congressional critics after North filed a constitutional challenge to the Iran-contra investigation...
...Over-papering is a common tactic oflarge law firms with deep-pocket clients squaring off against small law offices, but Davis Polk ranked high in papering even by these standards...
...The real problem is that Walsh and his twenty-seven lawyers have just one big case...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
