Above The Law 'Celebrities': Where Are They Now?

Find out what happened to the stars of ten of Above the Law's biggest stories.

6. Aaron Charney. Staying on the subject of discrimination, we turn to Aaron Charney, the gay lawyer who sued Sullivan & Cromwell in January 2007 for alleged discrimination based on sexual orientation. After lots of media coverage and a little legal skirmishing, the parties entered into a confidential settlement. (By the way, we welcome any information about the size of that settlement….)

I’m guessing the settlement was healthy, at least based on the real estate transactions Charney has engaged in over the intervening years. Later in 2007, he sold his one-bedroom condo for $972,500, then upgraded to a $1.5 million condo in 2008. Charney and partner (husband?) Benjamin Hanani sold that condo for $1.625 million, in 2010.

They’ve done deals outside of New York as well. In 2009, they bought an estate in Redding, Connecticut, for $2 million. In 2013, they purchased a lovely property (swimming pool included) in Manalapan, Florida, for just under $1.5 million. (It’s not clear whether they still have the Connecticut property; I’m guessing they sold it in favor of the Florida property.)

But Charney and Hanani seem to miss Manhattan. Per ACRIS, they bought a large one-bedroom in Museum Tower for $1.3 million in July of this year.

Might it be a pied-à-terre? According to his New York attorney registration, Charney now works in Boston, serving as vice president for corporate legal finance and risk management at American Tower Corporation, a publicly held owner and operator of wireless and broadcast communications infrastructure.

It looks like critics of Aaron Charney who said that suing S&C would kill his legal career were wrong. Today Charney has a coveted in-house job, a stable and loving relationship (he and Hanani have been together for more than eight years), and real estate up and down the East Coast. Life turned out pretty well for the young lawyer who dared to battle Biglaw.

(In case you’d like to see what Charney and Hanani look like today — okay, not today, but 2014 — scroll down to the last picture in this party write-up.)

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7. Alexandra Marchuk and Juan Monteverde. Not all lawsuits against law firms end with gigantic settlements. Lexie Marchuk’s salacious sexual-harassment suit against the boutique firm of Faruqi & Faruqi and one of its partners, Juan Monteverde, was a bit of a bust.

Earlier this year, an eagle-eyed ATL reader noticed that Juan Monteverde was no longer at the Faruqi firm and now listed himself on LinkedIn as the founding partner of Monteverde & Associates PC. This reader wondered whether the Faruqis had had enough of Monteverde. We reached out to Lubna Faruqi, who rejected such speculation in a colorful statement:

There is no truth to any rumors that Juan was fired (much to the disappointment of the haters!). Juan left to open his own firm. We are proud and supportive of Juan’s professional initiative. Our relationship continues as we together successfully litigate securities cases.

And what about Alexandra Marchuk? As of last year, she was working for a title insurance company, Fidelity National Financial, in Omaha, Nebraska. East and West Coast snobs might have found that a bit… depressing.

But it seems that Marchuk’s exile to Omaha is over. According to Florida bar records, in June of this year Marchuk was admitted to “limited practice” in Florida under the authorized house counsel rule (which basically lets in-house lawyers practice for their companies without taking the bar exam).

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Marchuk now works as in-house counsel for Fidelity National Finance — a publicly traded, Fortune 500 company — in Jacksonville, its headquarters city. Jacksonville might not be Hawaii, which is where Marchuk imagined she’d retire on her Faruqi settlement, but it is the largest city in a major coastal state — one with no personal income tax and great year-round weather. So after her trials and tribulations in New York, her banishment to Nebraska, and a less-than-thrilling trial verdict, Alexandra Marchuk did just fine for herself too.

8. Zachary Warren and the Dewey Crew. The implosion of Dewey & LeBoeuf is one of the biggest stories ever covered by ATL. So readers want to know: whatever happened to the four former Dewey folks who were hit with criminal charges by the Manhattan District Attorney?

Former executive director Stephen DiCarmine and former CFO Joel Sanders, whose first trial ended in a mistrial, will be tried again in January 2017. Former chairman Steve Davis entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement that bars him from practicing law in New York for five years.

But what about Zachary Warren, the dashing young Georgetown Law grad and former federal law clerk who worked at Dewey in a non-legal capacity before law school? He was the Dewey defendant who interested the ATL readership most (perhaps because some of you either know him personally or are connected to him through mutual friends, or perhaps because ATL readers could identify best with a T14 law school grad and former law clerk).

Warren also entered into a deferred-prosecution agreement. And now, like Johnathan Perkins, Warren can put his experience with the justice system to good use. This fall he’s starting as an associate at Williams & Connolly, one of the nation’s top litigation firms — and a firm famous for its white-collar criminal defense.

(Williams & Connolly pays a starting salary of $200,000, which is still above the post-Cravath starting salary of $190,000. But recall that historically the firm hasn’t paid year-end bonuses. If the major firms pay even modest bonuses, to say nothing of the Davis Polk bonuses of the past two years, then W&C associates will be earning quite a bit less than their peers. A raise might be nice — especially if Zach Warren still has outstanding legal bills.)

9. Janice Jentz and Bambo Obaro. The glamorous young couple behind that epic save-the-date video (sadly no longer available online) — how are they doing today, two years later?

Quite well. Obaro is still a litigation associate at Weil Gotshal, and last year he was sworn in as vice-president of the Federal Bar Association’s chapter for the Northern District of California. Janice Jentz is still at Winter & Ross, a Bay Area boutique specializing in family law. (Note to whoever wrote Jentz’s website bio: there is no such thing as a “juris doctorate.”)

Celebrity couples are sometimes unstable (pour one out for Brangelina), but Obaro and Jentz are going strong. In March of this year, they purchased a contemporary townhouse in San Francisco for $1.75 million, with both of them on the deed.

10. Shinyung Oh. Remember her? She’s the former Paul Hastings associate who wrote one of the most amazing departure memos of all time, which went on to become one of the most-read ATL posts of all time. There are too many awesome parts worth excerpting; just read (or re-read) it for yourself.

What’s Shinyung Oh up to today? We reached out, and she responded:

Last year, I finally made my bar membership inactive and admitted that I will never return to corporate law. This past semester, I enrolled myself in a local community college and have been taking classes. I’m hoping to be enrolled in a graduate program by next fall. A part of me feels ridiculous to be sitting in classes again, but a bigger part finds it liberating to be finally changing course and trying to figure out what I really want to be doing with my life.

For more about Shinyung Oh’s journey, read this eloquent and thoughtful post on her blog (which also mentions her age, 45, and her two children, a boy and a girl).

Good for Shinyung for having the courage to leave law behind and take that next step into the future, whatever it might hold. May she serve as an inspiration to all of us who are still trying to make sense of our careers and our lives.

11. Kashmir Hill. We’re feeling generous, so we’ll give you a bonus Above the Law celebrity: our very own Kashmir Hill, an ATL editor from 2008 to 2010. Early readers of this site will remember with fondness her wit and insight (and, perhaps with less fondness, an infamous comments meme that she inspired).

After Above the Law, Kash spent four years writing about privacy and technology at Forbes Magazine, where she started hanging out more often with hackers than lawyers. She is now at Fusion, the Univision-owned website and television channel, where she is still writing obsessively about privacy and also running the site’s tech section, Real Future. Her most recent favorite story involved solving a bizarre internet mystery, which sparked this interesting lawsuit. She still dreams of resuscitating the Courtship Connections column.

So there you have it: a look back on some of the most famous figures from ATL’s first decade. We hope you enjoyed reading about their current doings as much as we enjoyed stalking researching and writing about them.

Taken collectively, what’s the big lesson from these life stories? Legal careers — and human beings more generally — are surprisingly, impressively resilient. Almost all of the people discussed above have gone through challenging, difficult, or stressful times in their lives. And almost all of them have survived those experiences, overcome the obstacles, and found some measure of success, or at least stability. We wish them the best of luck in their travels down the great road of life.

Call me a Pollyanna, but most of the time, things turn out fine. As my friend and colleague John Balestriere recently wrote, “If we work hard, maintain our integrity, and don’t worry so damned much, things really do tend to work out.”

Earlier: Above The Law Turns Ten Today — ATL Celebrities: Where Are They Now?


David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.