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Musical Chairs: High Profile Kirkland Hire Draws Criticism

Wednesday, December 10, 2008 4:09 PM - By Elie Mystal

Michael Garcia new Kirkland Partner.jpgWhen you have a chance to hire a high profile U.S. attorney from the Southern District, it’s a move you almost have to make. Kirkland & Ellis snapped up U.S. attorney Michael Garcia, who is best known for his role in hounding “Client #9” out of town.

Garcia could make between $3 million and $4 million at Kirkland (sure, it’s the associates who are “greedy”), but it appears that not all of the partners were aware that there would be a new guy feeding at the trough. The Daily Beast reports:

Garcia’s sudden move to Kirkland & Ellis was engineered by executive committee member Jay Lefkowitz—a high-powered neoconservative who authored President Bush’s stem cell research policy and was once considered to serve as White House chief of staff. It caught many senior partners there by surprise. “Normally it would certainly be a plum to pick up a U.S. attorney, but frankly it’s disappointing when you first hear about it reading the morning New York Times,” one senior partner in the New York office told me.

On the one hand new partner hiring is not like elementary school. Not everybody gets to play. However, if hiring Garcia had been talked about more widely at Kirkland, perhaps more of his critics would have tried to stop it.

And Garcia does have a lot of critics. More after the jump.

Some critics question whether Garcia is even a very good attorney:

“Michael was just fine as a prosecutor,” one of his close colleagues confided, “but he never really managed to shine. He made his way up the ladder with good political instincts. He had a knack for knowing what would make the politicos happy, and he played that very effectively.”

Others criticize Garcia’s oversight of Wall Street:

The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office, dubbed the “Sovereign District of New York,” is arguably the most powerful prosecutorial office in the land. … But his record on wrongdoing on Wall Street has been negligible. His most notable case was a prosecution of KPMG officials in a tax-shelter controversy that ended badly, with the prosecutors getting a tongue-lashing from the judge over their mismanagement of the case.

But the heat Garcia is taking could be nothing more than partisan retribution. Sure, now Eliot Spitzer is a shamed sex addict, but it really wasn’t that long ago that Spitzer was the star in the Democratic party. Garcia’s role in bringing Spitzer’s shenanigans to light has been well documented:

Spitzer was vocal in his criticism of the Bush administration’s regulatory regime—charging that it had abdicated its responsibility to regulate the subprime mortgage market and that this failure could provoke a financial crisis. Spitzer was right on the money—and federal prosecutors took umbrage.

Michael Garcia provided the Albany Republicans just what they needed. At that moment, he opened an inquiry into Spitzer’s financial dealings, finding that he used a high-class escort service. Garcia drove the prosecution, staffing it up to the hilt. The inquiry yielded indictments written in language normally found in gossip columns, not in legal pleadings. The sensational story information was promptly leaked to The New York Times, which could be turned to for inside details as the case unfolded. (The Times scoops included first word of Garcia’s move. The Times later gave Garcia an interview that would be a PR agent’s dream, lacking any serious questions.) The press leaks were, of course, unethical and probably also criminal.

I kind of think party loyalty should stop at the hooker’s door. But K&E’s newest partner does come with a hint of controversy.

As long as he makes it rain, everybody will get past the past.

The Man Who Brought Down Spitzer [Daily Beast]

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Posted in: Kirkland & Ellis, Musical Chairs

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