A Look at Orrick’s Crisis Management Practice
Last week we wrote about the move of prominent D.C. lawyers Lanny Davis and Eileen O’Connor from Orrick to McDermott Will & Emery. Am Law Daily described the jump as follows: “Lanny Davis, a longtime Washington, D.C., lawyer who supported Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid and was a fraternity brother of George W. Bush, is taking his unique practice from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe to McDermott, Will & Emery.”
It’s not the case, however, that the entire practice moved. As noted by one commenter, the rest of the legal strategic and crisis management practice remained with Orrick. Consistent with this, an Orrick spokesperson issued the following statement to ATL:
We wish Lanny and Eileen well, but Orrick’s law, policy, media, and crisis management practice remains vibrant and strong with continuing plans for expansion and will keep delivering its unique blend of legal, public relations and government affairs counsel to our clients around the world.
Remaining at Orrick are partners Adam Goldberg, who was co-chair of the practice with Davis, and Joshua Galper. Goldberg and Galper will head the practice going forward. In addition, the associates who work in and with the law, policy and media group are staying at Orrick.
As for clients, it’s not yet clear which ones will stay with Orrick and which will move to McDermott. “Thankfully, this is a practice where we’ve always had plenty of work, so that’s not an issue,” Galper said. (We’d guess, however, that certain clients closely tied to Davis — like CEAL, the Honduras business group supporting the coup in that country — will travel with him.)
Get to know Messrs. Galper and Goldberg, and read more about Orrick’s very interesting and unusual practice area, after the jump.
From the perspective of lawyers who work (or aspire to work) in it, what’s so appealing about Orrick’s crisis management practice is that the work is challenging and varied. It’s not just straight-up litigation; it also involves dealing with government officials, regulators, policymakers, and journalists (surely the best part). The fact that the work is high-profile and high-stakes — and, presumably, high-paying — is also nice.
The crisis management practice appeals to clients as well. If you’re a major corporation faced with a crisis, your problem is a problem on many levels: it’s a legal problem, a political problem, and a public relations problem. Working with a crisis management practice ensures that efforts on these various fronts are handled in a coordinated way. And working with lawyers, of course, gives you the protection of attorney-client privilege. (Read more about Orrick’s group here.)
Orrick partner Adam Goldberg (top right), a graduate of Tufts and Harvard Law, is well-equipped to handle crises. He served in the White House counsel’s office from 1996 to 1999 — yup, the Monica years (weren’t they great?) — and he also served as a White House spokesman, fielding up to 100 media calls a day. He also worked at several other leading D.C. law firms prior to Orrick, including Swidler Berlin, before joining the Clinton Administration, and Covington & Burling and Patton Boggs, after leaving government service.
His fellow partner and group co-chair, Josh Galper (bottom right), is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School (where we were classmates; we’ll be seeing him at our reunion later this month). Galper also has extensive experience in law, communications, and strategy. He worked on Capitol Hill, for former Senator David Boren (D-OK), and he also served as press secretary for the University of Oklahoma (after Senator Boren became its president). Galper has worked on numerous presidential and other political campaigns, including those of Bill Bradley, John Kerry, and President Obama.
So how did the Orrick group come together? Well, in a very “D.C.” sort of way: working relationships forged in the public sector, on political campaigns and in government service, carried over into the private sector. (This happens in reverse as well; for example, Eric Holder and Gregory Craig have brought over a number of their Covington and Williams & Connolly colleagues to the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office, respectively.)
Adam Goldberg and Lanny Davis worked together on the 1996 Clinton campaign, and then again in the White House counsel’s office after Clinton’s reelection. Davis left when the fun started — i.e., at the beginning of L’Affaire Lewinsky — to join Patton Boggs, the first home of the law / media / policy practice. In 2002, Davis recruited Goldberg, who was then at Covington, to help grow the practice at Patton Boggs.
Galper and Davis also had a great deal in common. E.g., Yale College, the Yale Daily News, and Yale Law School — boola boola! The two got to know each other when Galper worked together with Lanny Davis’s wife, Carolyn, during the Palm Beach recount of 2000. Davis started recruiting Galper then, and Galper joined the group at Patton Boggs in summer 2003 (after stints working for some big D.C. names, including Rahm Emanuel, Robert Reich, and Gov. Brad Henry).
In fall 2003, the crisis management group moved from Patton Boggs to Orrick. Davis, Goldberg and Galper practiced together at Orrick for six years, where they handled a number of important and high-profile matters. E.g., the Whole Foods / Wild Oats antitrust matter (a good example of a crisis management engagement, since it involved litigation, regulatory, and media campaign components).
Alas, just like the Beatles, the band has broken up: Davis and O’Connor have shifted over to McDermott Will, while Goldberg and Galper are staying put at Orrick. All good things must come to an end.
It’s not clear what exactly prompted the split (although feel free to email us with info). It’s worth noting, however, that Davis and O’Connor are joining MWE’s regulatory and government strategies practice group, while Goldberg and Galper are staying in Orrick’s legal strategic and crisis management practice, a subset of the firm’s litigation group. Perhaps this reflects a slight divergence in terms of emphasis, in terms of government strategies / lobbying versus litigation (although it seems that both groups will continue to have rather interdisciplinary practices).
In any event, good luck to Adam Goldberg and Josh Galper as they continue their innovative and unique practice at Orrick. In this day and age, crisis management seems like a growth area.
Earlier: Musical Chairs: Lanny Davis and Eileen O’Connor Leave Orrick for McDermott
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Comments
First and last.
Why would anyone choose to go to McDermott?
Someone needs to send this post up for a ride on the old Who Cares Hindenburg.
Lanny Davis, in a nutshell:
After Tom Daschle was selected to be Barack Obama's Secretary of Health and Human Services and chief health care adviser, Matt Taibbi wrote: "In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle." One could easily have added: "And then there's Lanny Davis." Davis frequently injects himself into political disputes, masquerading as a "political analyst" and Democratic media pundit, yet is unmoored from any discernible political beliefs other than: "I agree with whoever pays me." It's genuinely difficult to recall any instance where he publicly defended someone who hadn't, at some point, hired and shuffled money to him. Yesterday, he published a new piece simultaneously in The Hill and Politico -- solemnly warning that extremists on the Far Left and Far Right are jointly destroying democracy with their conduct in the health care debate and urging "the vast center-left and center-right of this country to speak up and call them out equally" -- that vividly illustrates the limitless whoring behavior which shapes Washington generally and specifically drives virtually every word out of Lanny Davis' mouth.
Davis' history is as long and consistent as it is sleazy. He was recently hired by Honduran oligarchs opposed to that country's democratically elected left-wing President and promptly became the chief advocate of the military coup which forcibly removed the President from office. He became an emphatic defender of the Israeli war on Gaza after he was named by the right-wing The Israel Project to be its "Senior Advisor and Spokesperson." He has been the chief public defender for Joe Lieberman, Jane Harman and the Clintons, all of whom have engaged his paid services. And as NYU History Professor Greg Grandin just documented:
Recently, Davis has been hired by corporations to derail the labor-backed Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for unions to organize, all the while touting himself as a "pro-labor liberal."
Davis was also the chief U.S. lobbyist of the military dictatorship in Pakistan in the late 90s and played an important role in strengthening relations between then President Bill Clinton and de facto president General Perez Musharraf.
Most recently, Davis has aggressively attacked progressive critics of Whole Foods CEO John Mackey after Mackey, whose company targets progressive consumers, published a Wall St. Journal Op-Ed opposing health care reform. Needless to say, Davis had been hired by Whole Foods, serving as its lawyer in a protracted and expensive (i.e. profitable for Davis) antitrust battle with the Federal Trade Commission.
If Lanny Davis were just another Beltway lobbyist/lawyer piggishly feeding off our political system by serving whatever corporate interests happen to rent him, all of this would be too common to bother noting. But Davis parades around as -- and is treated by media organizations as being -- some sort of political pundit as well. He's presented by numerous media outlets as an independent analyst who opines on the news of the day -- yet does so almost exclusively in order to promote the interests of those who are paying him, relationships which are often undisclosed. Here's how he describes himself to clients and potential clients on his bio page at the firm, Orrick, where he's a partner:
He has been a regular television commentator and has been a political and legal analyst for MSNBC, CNN, Fox Cable, CNBC and network TV news programs. He has published numerous op-ed/analysis pieces in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and other national publications.
In other words, if you pay Davis to shill for you, he's able to exploit those media platforms to advocate for your interests while pretending to be an "analyst." When the Israel Project issued a Press Release announcing his hiring in the middle of the Israel-Gaza war, they pointedly touted that he "is Available Immediately for Interviews on Israel/Gaza and More." Though his service to the Israel Project was volunteer work, that's how it works in general: you drop coins in the slot in Davis' back and he dutifully goes forth on television and in newspapers and recites what you feed him. In their Press Release, they proudly noted:
Now a Washington, D.C. attorney, Mr. Davis is also a weekly columnist and frequent political analyst on major broadcast and TV cable shows, including NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and Fox News Channel, and is and op-ed contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and leading blog sites such as The Huffington Post, TheHill.com and FoxNews.com.
Davis' new piece in The Hill and Politico demonstrates how this works. Presenting himself as the Responsible Liberal-Centrist, he warns of what he calls "The Dangerous Joining of the Far Right and Far Left." He argues that "the extreme left and extreme right share more in common than those on their own side of the ideological divide when it comes to the issue of health care." In order to defeat the extremists on both sides "who threaten our democratic traditions and institutions," he pompously assumes the voice of Thomas Paine and issues this call to action: "When the far left and the far right join in the Politics of Hate and Demonization, it is time for the vast center-left and center-right of this country to speak up and call them out equally. Silence is no longer acceptable by responsible liberals towards the reckless far left or by responsible conservatives towards the reckless far right. Silence is complicity."
As for the monsters of the Right, Davis lists "the shouters shouting down other people who wish to speak at town meetings, whacko 'birthers,' and liars inventing 'death panels' and obscenely and recklessly mentioning Adolph Hitler and Nazi symbols to scare people." And who are the equivalents on the Left? The people who do this:
on the far left -- including the most vicious posters on the so-called liberal blogosphere, threatening businesses with one or more executives who offer personal ideas for achieving national health care reform different from the Administration's or Democratic congressional leaders' versions (full disclosure: I support all of President Obama's core principles for national health care legislation, though I still have many unanswered questions); hateful e-mails, phone calls, blogs, and personal attacks, distorting alternative ideas different from the Administration's approach and attacking the motives of those airing them; and intolerance for anyone who disagrees, including personal invective and demonization of those with different views.
Plainly, this whole rant has no purpose other than to argue that "the Left" is as bad as the screaming, gun-wielding right-wing townhall Limbaugh followers. Why? Because some progressives, in the wake of Mackey's anti-health-care-reform Op-Ed, organized a boycott of Whole Foods, Davis' client (that's all Davis means when he complains of "threatening businesses with one or more executives who offer personal ideas for achieving national health care reform different from the Administration's or Democratic congressional leaders' versions": they're harming the business interests of my paid client).
But there's no disclosure whatsoever that Davis here is doing nothing more than spewing outrage on behalf of a corporation that pays him (even as he deceitfully inserts the phrase "full disclosure" into the middle of his rant-- and then proceeds to "disclose" nothing other than his allegedly pro-Obama bona fides in order to make his attacks on "the Left" seem more credible). All Davis is doing here -- as usual -- is fulfilling his whore duty: Whole Foods dropped coins in his back slot and therefore he defends them by demonizing critics of its CEO. But readers of The Hill and Politico have absolutely no idea of Davis' real motives or his relationship to the corporation he's defending because both he and those magazines conceal that relationship. Instead, readers are misled into believing that he's an independent analyst who -- though a "liberal" himself -- just so happens to object to progressive campaigns against health care opponents because he's such a sincere, objective and responsible-centrist advocate for civility and fairness.
The overlap between -- and deliberate blurring of -- political power, media opinion-making, and large corporate largesse is unlimited now. The aforementioned Tom Daschle just spent an hour this past Sunday on Meet the Press ostensibly to analyze the health care reform debate despite the fact that, as Time's Michael Scherer documented, Daschle currently works for numerous health insurance industry interests, relationships completely undisclosed during the entire one-hour health care program. Between Richard Wolffe, the Pentagon's military analysts, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, Daschle, and Davis, one wonders if NBC News ever presents any "political analysts" who are free of undisclosed conflicts of interest.
What makes all of this particularly notable is that the centerpiece of Barack Obama's presidential campaign was putting an end to this type of corporate influence over our political debates -- particularly when those influences are concealed. Just marvel at how clear Obama promised to conduct health care negotiations out in the open in order to ensure that undisclosed pharmaceutical and insurance industry interests did not drive the process:
Obviously, as David Corn recently complained, none of that has even come close to happening. There is substantial debate over the role the Obama White House played in the apparent death of the "public option" -- did it happen against their wishes or with their blessing? -- but all one can do is guess at that question because, contrary to his crystal clear and oft-stated campaign pledge, the negotiations that lead to that collapse were completely secret. What one does know is that the pharmaceutical industry is so delighted with what they think will be the ultimate plan that they are spending vast sums of money to advocate for it, preceded by a secret White House deal with that same industry to ensure there are no government negotiations for better prices (a result that, when combined with mandates to buy health insurance, would vastly increase the profits of these industries). Indeed, it's difficult to recall a single piece of major legislation recently enacted over the objections of the large corporate interests that control and own the American political process.
Lanny Davis is just a face that reflects the grime and sleaze that lies at the core of our political culture. But it's a rather vivid face for what is typically meant by Centrism (i.e., it's shrill and irresponsible to suggest there's anything fundamentally wrong with our political culture); Civility (it's rude and disrespectful to highlight the oozing conflicts of interests and paid whoredom which animate our leading political luminaries); and Bipartisanship (the same narrow set of corporate forces always prevail no matter which party is in "control" by constantly paying those who control those parties). As unpleasant as it is, that's why there's value in casting one's eyes on how Lanny Davis functions.
What the heck is crisis management and why do you need a law degree to do this? I would rather pay a restaurant manager or a bouncer to manage crisis
before I pay a biglaw partner. What will these firms come up with next? "stress control"? Good grief. What kind of moronic clients shell out big bucks for crisis mangement? Sounds like something you would find in one of those cold war eastern bloc countries.
4 - That's really long. Can you post a link instead?
"Orrick partner Adam Goldberg (top right), a graduate of Tufts and Harvard Law..."
Attending the preeminent peer law school Harvard does not correct attending the non-preeminent, non-peer undergraduate school Tufts. In order to be esteemed, one must have a flawless lineage, immaculate education and obscene wealth. Mr. Goldberg's decision to attend Tufts has tainted the lineage of his descendants for eons.
Incidentally, I am a full-blooded aristocrat. I also gate my property off from the unwashed masses.
That article made me want to work with Lanny Davis. Taibbi's a colossal douche and uninformed leftist--the same guy who tried to pin every financial downturn on Goldman Sachs despite a shocking lack of understanding of basic economics and finance.
7 - elitist asshole
Legal, public relations and political issues all at once? Sounds like the bigger crisis is clearing all the conflicts checks. These guys should work in Hollywood the way they came up with this trifecta of problems. They also forgot to mention the following key words: financial, international, think outside the box, empowerment, diversity, cash for clunkers, cautious optimism. Shit, I might start my own crisis management team . . . in my pants.
@7 haha - tufts is horrible
It's nice to read something positive on ATL. More posts like this please.
I did it all for the nookie
what
the nookie
what
so stick it in your Orrick
yeah
your Orrick
yeah
Limp Dermott
This work sounds really cool actually (esp. for DC types who like to juggle legal practice with politics and journalism stuff).
What other firms besides Orrick have practices like this?
5 - The point is attorney-client privilege. If you hire a non-lawyer for this, the communications are discoverable.
lanny davis is a self-righteous idiot. if you ever watched him during the primaries, arguing/shilling for Clinton, you might think that Orrick made out all-right from this.
I worked with Josh and Adam - both a great guys and really hard workers. Best wishes to them!
@5 -- See Michael Clayton. That's why. Duh.
@4 - Wow! Interesting post. But, this isn't the correct site. ATL commentators only care about PE, lobsters, butt sex, and Elie's weight.
Mystal is a walrus, but you don't see Lat complaining, do you.
4: that is not a nutshell.
"It’s not clear what exactly prompted the split (although feel free to email us with info)."
Hard-hitting journalism in the 21st century. I weep for the future.
I second 18. I worked in the same office as Josh and Adam. They are both nice guys.
Signed,
Not 18, Josh or Adam.
4's excerpt is from a Glenn Greenwald column on Salon from a few weeks ago. It isn't from Taibbi.
JAKE--you're a pretentious elitist
PA bar results are out....passed!! 600 square feet on Rittenhouse secure!!
Wait...did these guys go to law school or did they get a B.A. in Communications Studies?
26 - it's JaKe. Get it right or perish.
Deal flow is back baby
Elie likes to have butt sex with PE's fat lobsters?
What a waste of space this post is. Lanny Davis is an idiot blowhard who does his clients more harm than good (see, e.g., Charlie Rangel). Using Above the Law to schill for your law school buddies is embarassing, Lat.
Things like this wouldn't happen if women surrendered their assholes more frequently.
"(We’d guess, however, that certain clients closely tied to Davis — like CEAL, the Honduras business group supporting the coup in that country — will travel with him.)"
That was a cheap shot.....
Fuck you, Lat, you racist Walrus!
I remember watching Lanny shrill for Hillary per-election.
I thought, that guy is a tool.
Folks, folks, let's all calm down here. Jake is actually contributing humor to the comments section using a literary device known as "sarcasm." Perhaps some of you could take time to look up the word in the midst of complaining about the BigLaw massacre of 2009. Sadly, the written word does not allow for much nuance. Jake, you're officially funnier than PE, btw.
My spelling errors in #36 are toolish.
But Lanny is a bigger tool than I.
Hands down.
I think I remember Hannity ripping him a new one. Seriously.
Orrick > You
-Orrick Secure
Orrick > You
-Orrick Secure
I wish Adam luck (he really is a nice guy and a good lawyer), but the fact is, this may just be an example of Orrick (like other firms) trying to hold on to clients by offering supposedly "sweetheart" deals to the "right hand men" of departing partners. A few years back a senior Orrick associate sued due to his treatment after he was ultimately unable to retain the clients. There are other examples of this situation at both Orrick and elsewhere. It usually ends poorly for the remaining lawyers because the clients tend to follow the senior partners.
The communication is only privileged to the extent the client is seeking legal advice.
Josh Galper played the part of Tony Kronman brilliantly in 3 consecutive Yale Law Revue shows. I was privileged to work with him on those endeavors. Whatever he accomplishes professionally will pale next to that achievement.
These guys must be good at their job if they forced ATL to post this love letter piece. Can't you at least admit it's a retraction for the prior post's error, Lat?
Orrick CEO Ralph Baxter must have decided not to run for political office, which is why he hired Lanny & Co in the first place - to help him make inroads with the Democratic Party.