Daily Journal Corp
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 19, 2010
Contact: Chuleenan Svetvilas
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CALIFORNIA LAWYER MAGAZINE ANNOUNCES
2010 CLAY AWARD WINNERS
SAN FRANCISCO, February 19 — California Lawyer magazine has named 44 attorneys around the state to receive the 14th annual California Lawyer Attorneys of the Year Awards. Their achievements had a significant impact in 2009, or their work is expected to have such an effect in the coming years. The awards recognize 27 accomplishments in 17 areas of legal practice.
The honored attorneys include sole practitioners, attorneys from international law firms, a state Assembly member, and law professors. The recipients of the CLAY Awards are featured in the March 2010 issue of California Lawyer ().
The attorneys and their achievements are briefly described below:
TIMOTHY T. COATES
Greines, Martin, Stein & Richland, Los Angeles
Category: APPELLATE LAW
In January 2009 COATES won a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court decision securing broader immunity for prosecutors in criminal trials (Van de Kamp v. Goldstein). Both state and federal prosecutors have long enjoyed immunity for actions connected with criminal charges they bring and cases they try. COATES got that rule expanded to cover prosecutors in their supervisory or administrative roles.
SHARON J. ARKIN
Sole practitioner, Los Angeles
THOMAS D. HAKLAR
Dougherty, Hildre & Haklar, San Diego
KEVIN F. CALCAGNIE
Robinson, Calcagnie & Robinson, Newport Beach
MARK P. ROBINSON JR.
Robinson, Calcagnie & Robinson, Newport Beach
Category: APPELLATE LAW
HAKLAR and ROBINSON led a team with ARKIN and CALCAGNIE that pulled out a groundbreaking victory in May at the California Supreme Court in a tobacco class action, In re Tobacco II Cases. The 4–3 ruling allows that some individuals may be members of a class even if they do not have standing to file suit on their own. Previously, a number of courts had denied class certification without a showing that all class members relied on the false claims.
MICHAEL W. BIEN
Rosen, Bien & Galvan, San Francisco
DONALD H. SPECTER
Prison Law Office, Berkeley
Category: CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
BIEN and SPECTER set a precedent on the ability of federal courts to cap state prison populations. In August, a special three-judge panel ordered the state to produce a plan for releasing roughly 50,000 inmates over two to three years to reduce the level of overcrowding from nearly 200 percent of capacity to 137.5 percent. The attorneys prevailed despite the restrictive Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1995, passed by Congress to discourage inmate litigation and limit the ability of a single federal judge to order prisoner releases in overcrowding cases.
ADAM B. WOLF
ACLU National Legal Department, Santa Cruz
Category: CONSTITUTIONAL LAW
WOLF argued his way to the most significant U.S. Supreme Court victory for students’ constitutional rights in 40 years, vindicating the Fourth Amendment rights of students against strip searches. The case involved a 13-year-old Arizona girl subjected to a strip search by school officials on the basis of uncorroborated accusations she possessed ibuprofen in violation of a school policy (Safford USD v. Redding).
RICHARD MARMARO
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Los Angeles
Category: CRIMINAL LAW
MARMARO represented lead defendant, William J. Ruehle, Broadcom’s former chief financial officer who faced criminal and civil fraud charges for backdating stock options. The district court not only dismissed the charges but called into question whether the backdating of stock options is even illegal—implicating several similar cases set for trial this year (USA v. Ruehle).
JUSTIN P. BROOKS
California Innocence Project, California Western School of Law, San Diego
ERIC S. MULTHAUP
Sole practitioner, Mill Valley
JAN STIGLITZ
California Innocence Project, California Western School of Law, San Diego
CHRISTOPHER J. PLOURD
Sole practitioner, San Diego
Category: CRIMINAL LAW
BROOKS and STIGLITZ led the California Innocence Project (CIP) to win reversal of convictions in 2009 for three clients who had been imprisoned for many years. CIP and PLOURD worked to get a Los Angeles Superior Court judge to dismiss charges against Reggie Cole who was convicted in 1995 for a shooting death and sentenced to life in prison without parole. A San Bernardino County judge reversed the murder conviction of William Richards, who was tried in 1997 and sentenced to 25 years to life. A Central District Court judge granted a petition filed by CIP and MULTHAUP, reversing the 2002 attempted murder conviction of Rafael Madrigal Jr.
MICHAEL RUBIN
Altshuler Berzon, San Francisco
Category: CRIMINAL LAW
RUBIN won a rare reversal—of both a death sentence and the defendant’s original conviction—which will set James Horton II free later this year. The employment attorney began working on the case in 1985, getting the California Supreme Court to overturn Horton’s death sentence in 1996—breaking a string of 110 straight affirmations, and then pursuing numerous state and federal appeals of the original conviction.
RUSSELL C. HANDY
Potter Handy, San Marcos
Catetory: DISABILITY RIGHTS
On behalf of his paraplegic client, HANDY secured a decision clarifying the long-standing murkiness among state statutes and between state and federal laws about proof required of Californians with disabilities who seek relief from discrimination (Munson v. Del Taco, Inc.). In June, the California Supreme Court unanimously ruled that injured plaintiffs need not prove discriminatory intent.
HENRY C. SU
Howrey, East Palo Alto
Category: DISABILITY RIGHTS
Last year SU logged more than 800 billable hours in 15 pro bono cases, many of which concerned disability rights—including a significant victory for nearly three million individuals in a case against the Social Security Administration. In that case the federal court concluded that communicating with blind beneficiaries through CDs and Braille would often be less costly and more expedient than its current mailing program—and ordered the SSA to offer those by April 15, 2010. (American Council of the Blind v. Astrue)
R. PRESCOTT COLE
California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform, San Francisco
Category: ELDER LAW
Last year COLE spearheaded landmark state legislation that helps protect elderly consumers who are contemplating reverse mortgages from being bilked by aggressive and abusive marketing tactics. The Reverse Mortgage Elder Protection Act prohibits any reverse mortgage counselor from having a business relationship with a broker or lender. It also requires lenders to provide clients with a list of nonprofit counseling agencies, along with a suitability checklist specifying issues to discuss with a counselor before a loan application is approved.
CATHERINE A. CONWAY and REX S. HEINKE
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, Los Angeles
Category: EMPLOYMENT LAW
In Chau v. Starbucks Corp., CONWAY and HEINKE persuaded the Fourth District Court of Appeal to reverse a trial court’s ruling that the coffee megachain’s policy of divvying tips among workers was illegal—overturning a $105 million damages award to a certified class of baristas. In another Starbucks case, a class of 135,000 unsuccessful job applicants sought statutory damages, claiming that the Starbucks job application form violated California’s law prohibiting employers from asking about marijuana-related convictions. The appellate court granted Starbucks’s motion for summary judgment, ruling that the named plaintiffs were not protected under the statute because they had no marijuana convictions.
DAVID J. LAZERWITZ and SKY C. STANFIELD
Farella Braun + Martel, San Francisco
Category: ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
Thanks to the pro bono work of LAZERWITZ and STANFIELD, the Bureau of Land Management must re-evaluate thousands of miles of trails in the Western Mojave Desert that were designated over the past 30 years as off-road vehicle routes. On behalf of seven environmental organizations, the lawyers won a summary judgment requiring the bureau to adhere to federal statutes and its own regulations to protect sensitive environmental resources. The BLM manages the California Desert Conservation Area, 25 million acres of public land in the southern part of the state that is home to many protected animal and plant species.
ANDREW A. BASSAK
Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, San Francisco
RACHEL B. HOOPER
Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, San Francisco
DONALD B. MOONEY
Sole practitioner, Davis
Category: ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
This team of lawyers representing California Trout, Trout Unlimited, and a local citizens’ group helped defeat plans to build a water bottling plant that would siphon water from springs feeding the McCloud River. BASSAK, HOOPER, and MOONEY devised a strategy to oppose the project by, among other things, challenging deficiencies in Nestlé’s environmental impact statement and the county’s environmental review. Last September Nestlé withdrew its proposal to build in McCloud, citing plans to construct a bottling plant in the Sacramento area instead.
ERIC R. HAVIAN
Phillips & Cohen, San Francisco
Category: FALSE CLAIMS
The failure of an inexpensive transistor in a very expensive government spy satellite system led to the largest whistleblower settlement ever by a defense contractor: $325 million. HAVIAN represented scientist Robert Ferro’s False Claims Act case in this long-running battle that prompted the Air Force to overhaul its nondisclosure rules.
NANCY G. KROP
Sole practitioner, Redwood City
Category: FALSE CLAIMS
KROP won a $78.5 million whistleblower settlement, the largest in U.S. Department of Education history, for a case involving improper incentive pay to recruiters at the University of Phoenix. The victory came seven years after two university recruiters came to her claiming that the nation’s largest for-profit university had defrauded the department by obtaining billions in federal student loans and Pell Grants while making improper incentive payments to admissions recruiters based on the number of students they signed.
KAREN MUSALO
Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, UC Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco
Category: HUMAN RIGHTS
Thirteen years ago MUSALO began representing Rody Alvarado-Peña in her effort to gain asylum in the United States. A native of Guatemala, Alvarado-Peña had suffered ten years of extreme violence and sexual abuse from her husband before she fled the country in 1995. Last December Alvarado-Peña was finally granted asylum. Because the Matter of R.A. was seen as a test case for whether domestic violence victims can win asylum under a “social group” theory, this victory will have an immediate effect on similar claims.
PETER H. MASON
Fulbright & Jaworski, Los Angeles
Category: INSURANCE
In a precedent-setting case, MASON’s advocacy won the day for life insurers, sparing them from the reach of California’s Consumers Legal Remedies Act (CLRA). At issue was whether such companies are subject to the remedial provisions of the statute, which allow consumers injured by deceptive practices to recover damages and attorneys fees. MASON won a unanimous ruling from the state Supreme Court that life insurance was neither “goods” nor “services” under the CLRA and therefore not subject to its remedial provisions.
JEFFREY R. CHANIN
Keker & Van Nest, San Francisco
Category: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
A team of trial lawyers led by CHANIN convinced an Alameda County jury that Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. illegally obtained 61 trade secrets from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and breached a 2005 settlement agreement. In a settlement that quickly followed the verdict, SMIC agreed to pay TSMC $200 million in damages, plus $130 million in stock. The case demonstrated to the semiconductor industry that California trade secret laws can be used to protect the intellectual property of foreign companies that do business here.
JOHN E. GARTMAN
Fish & Richardson, San Diego
Category: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
GARTMAN led a trial team that represented Microsoft Corp. in seven separate patent infringement suits—including overturning a jury verdict of $1.53 billion and two additional jury trials—each of which alleged infringement and sought huge damage awards. By 2009, all seven cases were resolved, vindicating Microsoft’s and any other company’s use of digital-compression patents over the Internet, in audio and video devices (such as MP3s, DVDs, and Blu-ray), and in other key technologies.
KEVIN G. BAKER
Assembly Judiciary Committee, Sacramento
MIKE FEUER
Assemblymember, Los Angeles
THOMAS R. McMORROW
Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, Sacramento
JULIA R. WILSON
Legal Aid Association of California, San Francisco
Category: LEGISLATION
AB 590 makes California the first state in the nation to establish a right to counsel for low-income litigants in life-changing civil proceedings. This “civil Gideon” bill also calls for the launch of at least one pilot program starting in July 2011, to be funded by a $10 increase in some court fees. As chairman of the Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, FEUER (D-Los Angeles) authored the legislation. BAKER, the committee’s deputy chief counsel, who spent the past five years promoting the idea. WILSON mobilized the state’s legal aid societies. And McMORROW lobbied hard behind the scenes to win the governor’s support.
SCOTT A. EDELMAN
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Los Angeles
ANDREA E. NEUMAN
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Irvine
Category: LITIGATION
In 2008 Dole Food hired a Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher trial team to defend two follow-up cases after a Los Angeles jury found the company liable for $5.8 million in damages for exposing workers on its Nicaraguan banana plantations to a harmful pesticide. Suspicious of testimony in a related case, co-lead trial counsel EDELMAN and NEUMAN traveled to Nicaragua for a series of depositions, which raised doubts about the veracity of plantation workers’ accounts regarding their exposure to the pesticide. In April 2009, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge found “a heinous conspiracy” by plaintiffs attorneys, declared a fraud on the court, and dismissed the litigation with prejudice.
WILLIAM F. ABRAMS
Bingham McCutchen, East Palo Alto
Category: PRO BONO
ABRAMS led a team of Bingham lawyers to win a precedent-setting ruling at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declaring that California was unlawfully shortchanging its foster-care group homes. He is also representing the California Alliance of Child and Family Services in a parallel action filed last fall to stop the state from cutting its payment rate to group homes by 10 percent to help offset the budget deficit. In November he won a preliminary injunction prohibiting the rate cut.
DAVID H. FRY
Munger, Tolles & Olson, San Francisco
Category: PRO BONO
FRY led a small team of associates to win a half-billion-dollar settlement from the Social Security Administration—and force the agency to stop denying benefits to people because of an outstanding felony warrant. More than 200,000 poor, disabled, or elderly people had their benefits wrongfully denied or suspended. Last August the SSA agreed to change its policy on warrants and to pay $500 million to 80,000 Social Security recipients whose subsidies had been unlawfully withheld since January 2007. In addition, beneficiaries cut off before that date will be reinstated.
KEVIN A. CALIA and GORDON P. ERSPAMER
Morrison & Foerster, San Francisco
Category: PUBLIC-INTEREST LAW
In a case of first impression, CALIA and ERSPAMER established the constitutional principle that veterans seeking service-related benefits have due process rights—not only after they’ve been awarded benefits, but when they apply for them as well (Cushman v. Shinseki). ERSPAMER began working on the Vietnam War veteran Philip Cushman’s case in 1999 and CALIA since 2008. As a result of the attorneys’ work, veterans can now argue that an undue delay or unfair treatment in the processing of an application for benefits is, in itself, a constitutional violation.
RACHEL E. MATTEO-BOEHM
Holme Roberts & Owen, San Francisco
Category: PUBLIC-INTEREST LAW
MATTEO-BOEHM won two significant public records cases for the San Rafael–based California First Amendment Coalition to increase government transparency. In one case, the Sixth District Court of Appeal ordered the release of a detailed planning map and the largest-ever recovery award for a case enforcing the California Public Records Act—$500,000 in attorneys fees. In the second case, Matteo-Boehm represented both the coalition and Berkeley-based , eventually settling a lawsuit against California’s Office of Legislative Counsel.
MICHAEL J. DOWD
Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, San Diego
Category: SECURITIES LAW
DOWD led a trial team to a rare verdict in a securities class action that resulted in a finding of liability for the plaintiffs after a two-week trial. Several union pension funds alleged Household (now part of HSBC) and three individual defendants made false and misleading statements about the Illinois lender’s financial results and operations. In the damages phase, now underway, class members could recover as much as $3 billion (Jaffe v. Household Int’l, Inc.).
JOHN A. FORE and ANDREW J. HIRSCH
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, Palo Alto
Category: TRANSACTIONAL LAW
FORE and HIRSCH’s work will enable Solyndra, a Fremont manufacturer of solar photovoltaic systems, to launch a $733 million plant capable of building enough solar panels to generate up to 500 megawatts annually—the energy needed to power half a million homes. HIRSCH helped negotiate a $535 million federal loan guarantee backed by the Department of Energy, making Solyndra the first U.S. company to secure such financing under the Energy Policy Act of 2005. FORE negotiated the $286 million equity deal needed to secure the loan.
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