Boutique Law Firms, Media and Journalism, Musical Chairs, Solo Practitioners

Musical Chairs: More About Lanny Davis's Departure from McDermott

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In yesterday’s post about the departure of D.C. power broker Lanny Davis from McDermott Will & Emery, a firm he joined a little over six months ago, we put out a request for more information. That request was promptly answered — by none other than Lanny Davis himself.

The drama lover in us was hoping for an epic tale of office intrigue and power struggle at McDermott Will (and commenters were happy to speculate). As it turns out, however, the parting of Davis and MWE is quite amicable — and far from total. As Davis explained to us, he’s setting up his own shop, but he will continue to work closely with McDermott lawyers, serving McDermott clients. In fact, Davis isn’t even leaving the building (so no office exorcism necessary).

What’s going on here? Information from our chat with Lanny Davis, plus the complete press release mentioned previously by the Washington Post, after the jump.

We spoke with Lanny Davis by telephone last night. He explained that news of his new firm’s launch wasn’t supposed to break until Monday — when his new website will be up and running, at www.lannyjdavis.com. So he put out the news on an embargoed basis, to be held until Monday. Alas, the embargo didn’t hold.

“Nobody can keep a secret in Washington!” said Davis, with a laugh. “Here I sent out a draft release with an embargo for Monday. Next thing I know, it’s all out all over the place.”

We asked Davis why he’s deciding to strike out on his own. The upshot: independence has its advantages.

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“In the last six months since I’ve arrived at McDermott, I’ve had to turn down opportunities to work with other lawyers in other law firms whose clients needed help from someone in my unique niche — someone who has attorney-client privilege and who also knows how to deal with the media. This was the niche that I saw when I left the White House [in 1998],” he said.

Now that he has his own firm, Davis will be able to represent both McDermott clients and clients of other law firms, as they grapple with the legal, political, and media crises that Davis is a veteran at addressing. He’s forming a new law practice, Lanny J. Davis & Associates LLC, as well as related non-legal entities that will develop political and communications strategies and work closely with the law practice.

In his law practice, he will continue to work with McDermott attorneys — most notably Eileen O’Connor, who has worked with Davis for years, and who is remaining at MWE — on matters for McDermott clients.

“It will be seamless,” said Davis. In fact, he’s not even leaving McDermott’s office building: he’s moving only a few floors down, to a new space with a separate waiting room. MWE lawyers will be just an elevator ride away.

But being officially independent of McDermott has its advantages. Davis will be able to branch off into non-legal fields, such as public relations, and he can now work with law firms other than McDermott, representing clients of those firms — or even the firms themselves.

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Davis recounted a conversation he recently had with a lawyer friend of his, who said to Davis, “I wish we could use you, because my firm is being sued.” But this friend noted that Davis’s status as a partner of a competing law firm would make the engagement tricky. Davis responded: “Guess what? In about a week or so, you can hire me.”

A cornerstone of such sensitive engagements is the attorney-client privilege.

“There are public relations consultants who have law degrees but who can’t have privilege if they are not attorneys giving legal advice,” said Davis. “These consultants can be subject to depositions and document production.”

“But I can market myself to other lawyers and work with other lawyers protected by attorney-client privilege,” Davis said, noting that he has been practicing law since 1972.

Business right now is good in the crisis-management space. “I’ve been turning down lots of clients,” said Davis. He attributed some of the interest to the recognition of his work on the Whole Foods case, a high-stakes combination of litigation, congressional strategy, regulatory strategy (dealing with the Federal Trade Commission), and media relations.

Davis described practicing law, talking to the media, and devising legislative and regulatory strategies as the “three disciplines” of a crisis management practice. “This is the tripod of skills a lawyer needs to have.” He emphasized the need for lawyers to learn how to talk to and work with the media. The traditional approach of “no comment” is no longer acceptable.

(Random tidbit: Lanny Davis’s son is a journalist — Seth Davis, of Sports Illustrated and CBS Sports. As a college basketball analyst, Seth has been getting a lot of airtime lately. “I’m proud to say that these days I’m known as Seth Davis’s father,” Lanny Davis joked.)

Davis also stressed the importance of transcending partisanship — even in D.C. As stated in his press release, “In today’s Washington, there is usually no ‘Red’ solution or ‘Blue’ solution, but almost always the best solution is a ‘purple’ or bipartisan solution.” Davis told us that even though he’s a Democrat, a veteran of the Clinton White House, he is “talking to some fairly high-profile Republican communications experts about informally affiliating with one another.”

Finally, Davis underscored how grateful he is for McDermott’s cooperation with and encouragement of his new venture.

“I couldn’t be more thankful to McDermott for allowing me to do this and for supporting me in it,” said Davis. “This is a win-win situation for me and for McDermott.”

Congratulations and good luck, Mr. Davis! We’ll follow your new venture with interest.

(Brian Baxter of Am Law Daily also spoke with Lanny Davis yesterday; you can read his post here. The press release from Davis is reprinted in full below. For more discussion of crisis management, see our earlier profile of Orrick’s practice in this area.)

Lanny J. Davis [official website – launching 4/19/10]
Lanny Davis Leaves McDermott, But Not the Building [Am Law Daily]
Davis Hanging Out His Shingle [Washington Post]
Lanny Davis Strikes Out on His Own [The BLT: The Blog of the Legal Times]

Earlier: Musical Chairs: Lanny Davis Out at McDermott Already?
A Look at Orrick’s Crisis Management Practice

PRESS RELEASE — LANNY J. DAVIS

Lanny J. Davis To Form New Law Firm Specializing in Intersection of Law, Media, Crisis Management, and Legislative Strategies For U.S. and International Clients

WASHINGTON, April 14, 2010:

Lanny J. Davis, a Washington D.C. attorney, litigator, and former Special Counsel to President Clinton and member of President Bush’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, today announced that he will organize his own law firm, Lanny J. Davis & Associates, LLP.

The new firm will provide a unique combination of traditional legal and litigation services plus media/crisis management, and legislative /public policy strategies to solve U.S. and international client problems — three disciplines in which Davis has extensive experience over more than three decades of law practice and political and activities at national, state, and local levels.

Davis’ firm’s new website can be found at http://www.lannyjdavis.com. While he has resigned as partner in the Washington D.C. office of the global law firm of McDermott Will & Emery, Davis will continue to contribute to the “Legal Crisis Strategies” blog that he and his former colleague at McDermott, Eileen M. O’Connor, began in 2009, together with other former colleagues at McDermott, which can be found at http://LegalCrisisStrategies.com.

“I am excited by this opportunity to offer multi-discipline, solution-oriented legal-media-legislative strategies services to U.S. and international clients. I especially look forward to working with not only McDermott attorneys and clients, but also, with other attorneys and law firms on high profile litigation and regulatory matters,” Davis said.

As a practicing attorney and experienced litigator, Davis would be able to share the confidentiality protection of attorney-client privilege with other attorneys involved in sensitive litigation and regulatory matters.

“I have learned over the years that having the protection of the attorney-client privilege, and thus, full access to my fellow attorney practitioners and all the facts and documents, good and bad, is essential to developing an effective media message and maintaining credibility with the media,” Davis said.

In addition, Davis indicated he hopes in the future to affiliate with prominent Republican and Democratic public affairs, lobbying and political consulting firms, both in the U.S. and abroad, providing bipartisan expertise to solve a variety of U.S. and international client problems.

At some point he could form separate companies or joint ventures for these additional disciplines, he said. Davis’s background has emphasized such bi-partisan approaches.

In 1996-98, he served as Special Counsel to President Clinton in 1996-98. In 2006-07, Davis served on the 5-member “Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board,” appointed by President George W. Bush, a friend from Yale College in the 1960s.

Davis writes a weekly column for The Hill newspaper, whose circulation includes every member of the U.S. congress, called the “Purple Nation,” which also appears on liberal as well as conservative blog sites, such as the Huffington Post, the Daily Caller, Newsmax and others.

“In today’s Washington, there is usually no “Red” solution or “Blue” solution but almost always the best solution is a ‘purple’ or bipartisan solution,” Davis said.

“There are often no purely legal solutions to legal problems either,” he added.

“Frequently legal issues overlap with media and legislative issues, and my new law firm and other non-legal entities organizations I hope to organize or affiliate with in the future will use all these three disciplines, as needed, to solve client problems.”

Davis also has represented foreign governments, organizations, and businesses to help solve domestic and Washington-based problems, and he plans to continue to do so, as well as assist U.S. companies with media and political problems abroad. “The rules of media and crisis management have no borders,” Davis said.

The sub-title of Davis’s memoir of his experiences at the Clinton White House in 1996-98 as White House Special Counsel and media spokesperson on legal investigations represents his strategic mantra for legal crisis management advice: “Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself.” Davis has lectured on the subject of using a multi-disciplinary approach to law practice and media crisis management throughout the United States, in Europe, in China and Japan.

Regarding his departure from McDermott Will & Emery, he stated: “I am grateful to my friends and former partners at McDermott for supporting my decision to begin my own firm while still continuing to service not only McDermott partners and clients now and in the future but other lawyers and law firms as well,” Davis said.

Peter Sacripanti, co-managing partner of McDermott, said, “We have been fortunate to have had Lanny as our partner and have encouraged him to make this decision that we see as benefiting our firm, since Lanny’s new firm will continue to work closely with our partners and clients while also allowing Lanny to grow and diversify his unique practice combining legal-media-public policy capabilities.”

Davis first learned the value of combining law practice, which afforded the confidentiality protection of the attorney-client privilege, with strategic media and legislative/public policy advice when he served as President Clinton’s Special Counsel. In that capacity he experienced first-hand the intersection of law, media, and public policy. After returning to private practice in 1998, he recognized that U.S. and international clients often needed this triad of disciplines to achieve favorable legal outcomes, such as ensuring accurate and complete media coverage to avoid prejudice to the jury pool and sometimes seeking legislative or regulatory agency solutions to reinforce or encourage a legal solution.

In 2000, Davis began a new inter-disciplinary practice group called “Legal Crisis and Strategic Communications” Practice at the Washington, DC law firm of Patton Boggs, together with Eileen M. O’Connor, an award-winning former CNN correspondent and ABC News producer. He also considers that firm’s founder, Thomas Hale Boggs, Jr., as a mentor and role model for this approach — using legal analytical and fact-finding skills to add value to traditional Washington D.C. lobbying and regulatory agency representation.

Background

Legal Experience: Davis is a graduate of Yale College (1967), where he served as Chairman of the Yale Daily News, and Yale Law School (1970), where he won first prize in the prestigious Thurman Arnold Moot Court competition.

Davis began practicing law in Washington in 1972 as an associate at Arnold & Porter, focusing on administrative, environmental, and anti-trust litigation. In 1975, Davis joined the Washington D.C. firm then known as Patton Boggs & Blow. He was made a partner in 1978.

During his early years at Patton Boggs, he developed an extensive U.S. and international commercial and computer contracting practice, authoring a text and form book on computer contracting in the late 1970s and lecturing in the U.S. and abroad on computer contract negotiations techniques.

He also helped organize a computer contracting division of the D.C. Bar Association, serving as its first chair.

During his almost 40 years of law practice, he specialized in complex litigation in a variety of areas in U.S. and international cases, serving as both plaintiff and defense counsel in government contracts protests and litigation, False Claims, RICO, and anti-trust and FTC cases. It was in many of those cases that he first learned that the effective use of combined litigation, media, and legislative strategies could lead to successful results for clients, rather than the more traditional “silo” approach of hiring separate firms for each of these three disciplines.

Political, White House, Media/Writing Background. In 1976 Davis won a contested primary among leading Democratic elected officials to become the Democratic nominee for congress in Maryland’s eighth congressional district (Montgomery County, in the Washington suburbs.) He lost by a narrow margin in the general election.

Davis then was elected by the Maryland Democratic State Central Committee to three four-year terms to the Democratic National Committee. He served on the DNC from 1980-1992, was elected President of the DNC Eastern Region Caucus and served as a member of the DNC’s Executive Committee.

In 1996, President Clinton asked him to become “Special Counsel to the President” to handle both legal issues and deal with the White House press corps covering various congressional and other investigations, primarily regarding the campaign finance activities of the Clinton 1996 presidential campaign. In that capacity, Davis worked closely with the White House Press Secretary Michael McCurry, Rahm Emanuel, currently President Obama’s Chief of Staff, and White House Special Counsel Lanny Breuer and others to deal with overlapping legal, media, and political issues and to attempt to keep media coverage accurate and balanced.

As Special Counsel and press spokesperson and strategist, Davis won a reputation among the press corps for transparency and honesty. In the fall of 1997, he was the subject of a favorable cover about his transparency strategies in the national magazine, “The New Republic.”

In 1998-99, after leaving the White House, Davis appeared as a volunteer virtually daily and nightly on broadcast and cable TV in defense of President Clinton during the impeachment vote and through President Clinton’s final acquittal by the U.S. Senate. Davis appeared frequently on all the major Sunday news interview shows – NBC’s “Meet the Press,” ABC’s “This Week,” CBS’s “Face the Nation,” CNN’s “Late Edition,” and “Larry King Live,” and in recent years as a political analyst on Fox News, CNN, CNBC, and MSNBC.

Over many years Davis has published op eds on political and foreign affairs issues in numerous national and international newspapers and Internet political sites, such as including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Washington Times, The Hill, the Khleej Times (Dubai), the Huffington Post, Politico Arena, and the Daily Caller.

As noted above, he publishes a weekly column on Thursdays in The Hill newspaper, circulated throughout congressional offices and elsewhere and appearing on the Internet on http://thehill.com/. He discusses his Hill column weekly on Thursdays on the XM/Sirius show, POTUS, hosted by Joe Mathieu, and on the nationally syndicated radio network show, “America’s morning.”

He continues to make occasional guest appearances as a political analyst on CNN, Fox News, CNBC, and MSNBC and at times on NBC, CBS, and ABC news.

Books Published

In 1999, Davis published his White House memoir, “Truth to Tell.” Noted NBC journalist and former host of “NBC’s Nightly News,” Tom Brokaw, wrote this about Lanny’s White House memoir on press and crisis management: “Lanny Davis has written a book that should be required reading for all Washington officials and journalists alike. It’s an instructive and cautionary tale of the constant struggle to know the truth of what is going on at the highest levels of government.”

Noted journalist Carl Bernstein, co-author of “All the President’s Men,” wrote of the memoir: “On the air and now in print, Lanny Davis has managed the considerable feat of serving all his constituents extremely well: President, Press and Public. This is a very thoughtful book.”

In 2006, Davis authored a book focusing on the growing political polarization in America entitled, “Scandal: How ‘Gotcha’ Politics Is Destroying America” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Reflecting his bi-partisan approach to legal and strategic crisis management, the book was praised by a broad spectrum, from left to right.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina wrote about the book: “This book could not come at a more appropriate time in American political life. Whether it’s a debate on the war, judges, taxes, or almost anything else, the ability of Americans to engage each other with respect and dignity is being lost. Lanny Davis has been on the front lines of some of the sharpest debates in our nation’s history. We should listen and learn from his experience and observations.”

Liberal Democratic and famous Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote of “Scandal”: “Davis is that rare insider who is capable of being fair to all sides. He is willing to cast blame on his own party, his own candidates, and even his own self, along with those on the other side who deserve blame.”

Conservative nationally-syndicated talk show host Michael Medved wrote: “To many conservatives, Lanny Davis is a cherished anomaly: A thoughtful liberal, a decent guy, and a fair-minded Democratic operative who loves his country even more than he loves his party.”

National political reporter, columnist, editor, and author Carl Cannon wrote: “In this polarized nation of 280 million souls, Lanny Davis is one of a select few who maintains a personal affection for both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. If you read this book you’ll know why this is true — and why we’re all diminished because it’s so rare. Lanny’s expose of ‘gotcha’ politics is not just a lament about the lack of civility in American public discourse. It’s a compelling call for a truce in our ‘war room’ style of perpetual campaigning.”

And Indiana Democratic Senator Evan Bayh wrote: “I am confident that Lanny Davis speaks for most Americans when he decries the coarsening of our political discourse and dysfunction it has created in Washington. Hopefully, his work will serve as a wake-up call and prompt a better, more productive kind of national political leadership.”

The Civility Project. In 2009, Davis was invited by Mark DeMoss, a conservative/evangelical public relations executive, to co-chair the “Civility Project” that DeMoss had founded, found at http://www.civilityproject.org. The Project invites signatories to sign the “Civility Pledge,” committing to civil dialogue and rejecting the politics of demonizing political opponents.

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