Legal Eagle Wedding Watch: Couple of the Month for April


It’s time for readers to choose the Legal Eagle Wedding Watch’s Mr. and Mrs. April 2009. Will it be the couple with four Penn degrees, the spunky HLS grads, or the silver-haired former ambassador and his Bushie bride?
Keep in mind that when you vote, you’ll be helping to determine which couple will be eligible to compete in December for the honor of being ATL’s 2009 Couple of the Year — the crème de la crème of legal/marital enviability.
Here are your finalists:

1. Elissa Bassini and Jeremy Pick
2. Tracy Zuckerman and Ryan Van Grack
3. Leslie Fahrenkopf and Thomas Foley

If you’re ready to vote, here’s the poll. If you need a refresher, you can find our write-ups on the couples after the jump. Voting concludes at noon on Friday.



1. Elissa Bassini and Jeremy Pick
(Buy them a cocktail pick set.)
The Case:
– This couple met at the University of Pennsylvania as undergrads (she was summa; he was cum laude). They stuck around the place (wherever it is; we don’t care) for grad school, she in law and he in medicine.
– Jeremy’s finishing his MD while Elissa works as an associate at Ballard Spahr in Philadelphia.
The Case Against:
– What’s only marginally more impressive than one UPenn degree? Four UPenn degrees!

2. Tracy Zuckerman and Ryan Van Grack
(Buy them a loaf pan.)
The Case:
– This bride and groom are both Harvard Law School graduates (the groom was magna). Tracy has an undergraduate degree from Cornell; Ryan was summa at Duke.
– Tracy works for Population Services International (which sounds like a sinister pest-control operation but is actually a non-profit), while Ryan is an associate at Williams and Connolly.
– The co-officiant at their wedding was Judge Michael Daly Hawkins of the Ninth Circuit, for whom the groom clerked.
The Case Against:
– The mother of the groom bears the inexcusable name “Gail Van Grack-Aks,” and she teaches elementary school. You have no one to blame but yourself, Mrs. Van Ass-Crack.

3. Leslie Fahrenkopf and Thomas Foley
(Buy them a soup bowl.)
The Case:
– Holy crap, where do we begin? She’s Yale-UVA (JD); he’s Harvard-Harvard (MBA). She’s a former associate counsel to President George W. Bush; he’s a wealthy businessman who was recently Bush’s ambassador to Ireland. She’s 41; he’s 57.
– The “lavish” nuptial festivities, which took place in Ireland, were attended by 350 guests, including U2’s The Edge and Larry Mullen.
– A profile of the ambassador in the Irish press — one that embarrasses the subject only slightly less than the reporter — describes the groom thusly:

Tom Foley is a lean, handsome man of 57 with a good head of hair and fine American teeth, in a navy suit with the nipped-in waist that men of a certain age who manage to stay in shape tend to favour, the trousers held up with one of those fancy Kieselstein cowboy-style belts with the real silver buckles that says ‘I may have to wear a suit for work but underneath it all I’m a macho guy who’d be happier out on the ranch doing some real work’.

The Case Against:
– He’s old . . . like, old for the earth. And it’s his second marriage, natch. But she’s 41 and a lawyer, not a cocktail waitress, so it’s respectable.
– Their china is oh-so-expensive ($245 for each bread-and-butter plate), but it’s also achingly gorgeous. And it’s nice to see that even multi-millionaires appreciate the $38 glass bowl set from Williams-Sonoma.

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