Skadden D.C. Really Has No Idea What It's Doing

Skadden told their lawyers they "negotiated" with the band hurting their precious ears? What does a Skadden "negotiation" actually look like? You'll be embarrassed. At least they should be.

UPDATE — 5/28/15 12:14 p.m.: Scroll down for an update on the band’s where is playing now.

Last week, we got a leaked email from that eggshell law firm, Skadden Arps in D.C., explaining their ongoing grievous injury at the mercy of a bunch of street performers torturing their ever so sensitive ears. Office leader Mitch Ettinger informed his troops that he’d tried everything from “negotiating” with the band to move to calling on the United States Secret Service, all to no avail. So Skadden D.C. attorneys soldier on in the face of Buskergate.

And they say there are no more heroes.

On Friday, Harrison Smith of Washingtonian magazine went out and did some real shoe-leather journalism, interviewing the Spread Love Band, the group giving Skadden so much trouble. He asked them about “negotiating” with Skadden, and what they recount is about what you’d expect:

Around two weeks ago, the band says that someone from Skadden offered them $200 a week to play somewhere else, anywhere else.

Really? Skadden probably charges more than $200 an hour to have some dead-eyed 22-year-old paralegal make photocopies! Hell, a high-quality decibel meter, like the one Skadden claims to have bought to lodge its complaint under the Noise Control Protection Amendment Act of 2008, retails for around $150 (affiliate link). Remember last week when I said the problem with Washington was the contempt — conscious or unconscious — that office-dwellers have for the city’s actual residents? Skadden assumed it could buy off a 5-member band for about $6/day/member. “That must be real money to the sort of people who deign to play instruments to delight the slack-jawed tourists,” Skadden must have thought.

Well, it’s not. You can’t get a ten-year-old to mow your lawn for that kind of scratch! In reality, each member of the band pulls down $200 every day playing in its prime location across from the White House. Anywhere they move will surely cost the band more than $200/week.

Sponsored

And why leave their regulars? Another of Skadden’s follies — revealed by the Washingtonian article — was asking the Secret Service to get the band evicted. It was already an idea infused with pure, uncut stupid, but reportedly the Secret Service make up the band’s core audience:

Secret Service agents, who work right next door at the Treasury Building and White House campus, supposedly tip them every day, dropping bills into a bucket that’s set up next to a blackboard.

As for Skadden’s other hare-brained scheme to hire a string quartet to arrive on the spot earlier in the morning — in addition to being the whitest sentence I’ve ever read and almost assuredly costing the firm well in excess of $200/week — well, Spread Love Band has some thoughts on that strategery as well:

The Skadden email noted one other “measure” the firm might use to remove the band: “hiring a string quartet to arrive earlier in the day and assume their spot.”

What if the firm follows through on that idea? “Doesn’t matter,” says [Spread Love Band member] Stixxx. “We’ll move on down. And then if we really wanted to be assholes, we’d outplay the string quartet. Come on now. We outplay speakers outside of the Verizon Center.”

“We can blow ‘em the f—k out of the water,” Stixxx says, as the band has done when other groups have tried to take its spot outside Metro stations. “You really think a string quartet is going to stop us?”

No, no one really thinks a string quartet is going to stop you. Indeed, we know for a fact that no one in Washington, D.C. — however “cultured” they claim to be — gives two damns about classical music. In 2012 2007, the Washington Post placed virtuoso Joshua Bell in a D.C. Metro station with his 300-year-old Stradivarius violin and the result… nobody cared. Bell pulled down a mere $32 in 45 minutes of work and the only commuter who actually seemed impressed was a three-year-old boy pushed out of the way by his impatient mother.

Sponsored

One of the premier violinists in the world armed with a multi-million dollar instrument still made half of Spread Love’s hourly rate. These days Bell serves as the acclaimed musical director of the Academy of St. Martin In The Fields. I’m not sure, but I hear he took that job because Skadden promised him $100 a week to move to England.

UPDATE: Looks like Spread Love may have moved. We don’t know if this is a permanent relocation or a temporary victory for Skadden, but a tipster alerts us that:

I don’t know if they have abandoned Skadden, but Spread Love is now performing outside the Farragut North Metro (right by 1001 Connecticut Avenue) I took a picture, which is attached. I don’t believe there is a big law firm in that building, but it is not a tourist location like the Skadden office, and there are probably 2 dozen big law firms within a half block of it.

We’ll keep on this one.

Meet the Musicians Who Are Driving Skadden, Arps Bonkers [Washingtonian]

Earlier: Why Are D.C. Lawyers Such Frigging Babies?