Biglaw

Jones Day Responds To Critics With Standard Petulant Hissy Fit

Everything about this matter really seems to get under their skin and it's not a good look.

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Long before the firm set its sights on making America great again, Jones Day locked a laser focus on picking over the corpse of the quintessential great American city. Back in 2013, Michigan’s long-running effort to disenfranchise its citizens to better transfer public resources to private contractors — contractors who almost certainly weren’t the donors to the unlimited, fully anonymous donation fund that caused all that controversy — finally landed on Detroit.

That’s when the state hired Kevyn Orr, a noted Jones Day partner, to take on the mantle of unelected czar of Detroit, tasked with shepherding its bankruptcy to completion. Orr dutifully resigned from the firm before assuming his new responsibilities… and then he hired Jones Day to reap the multi-million dollar legal bills he would ring up during his tenure.

Orr has since returned to the firm.

In a purely legal sense, this isn’t a conflict. But there’s a reason we generally employ the maxim “to avoid even the appearance of impropriety.” From the perspective of the people of Detroit, the state threw over their future to a former law partner who sent millions to his old firm and then jumped back to share in that firm’s success. Not exactly endearing to his supposed constituents, and the sort of move that, understandably, puts every deficiency in his tenure under a microscope.

That’s why it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Mayor Mike Duggan of Detroit recently announced that he’s considering a lawsuit against Orr and Jones Day alleging that they hid details of their pension restructuring plan that left the city with a $491 million hole. A relationship founded on such profound distrust was almost certainly going to end this way.

Now, the Mayor’s remarks might have required a response from the firm. Perhaps a short, measured statement denying the allegations and pledging to work to ensure that the city is satisfied with their work. There’d be no need to go extremes over a potential lawsuit. But then, as Jones Day even admits, the Mayor’s office told its lawyers to “stand down” on the hypothetical suit.

Confronted by a once-threatened lawsuit that was never filed and now rests explicitly on the back burner, Jones Day has no reason to make any statement at all. So, obviously, they wrote a long letter hurling insults in an adolescent rant. Of course they did.

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In a letter written late last month and recently made public, Jones Day’s Stephen Brogan wrote a 13-page letter ripping Mayor Duggan and spelling out in great detail why the firm thinks it would win the lawsuit that apparently isn’t coming. On their face, Jones Day’s defenses seem very strong — at least without hearing the other side — but that’s not really the point. This sort of Streisand-ing would be ill-considered enough before tacking on almost a page worth of personal attacks against the Mayor and, by extension, the people of Detroit, because ad hominem is a kind of argument:

If this case goes forward, we will prove that it does not — and cannot — serve the interests of your real client, the City of Detroit, but instead is designed only to serve the venal interests of a political hack who has placed personal animus and self-interest ahead of the truth. Mayor Duncan wanted to POA for its clear benefits but now wants to blame court sanctioned compromise because he is apparently too incompetent to do the job he took on. No mayor in the history of this country has received the assistance that the POA gave to Detroit — removing $7 billion in liabilities from its balance sheet — and yet he appears singularly incapable of taking advantage of that fresh start to help the people of Detroit, who Jones Day served well and proudly.

Wow. I just… wow. Seriously, what does this serve? Why “poke the bear” of the potential adversary who has already pulled back? And it’s not just the matter of insulting Mayor Duggan himself — this letter accuses the people of Detroit of electing “a long line of corrupt Detroit politicians.” These people liked this guy so much they elected him as a write-in candidate.[1] When you insult him as incompetent and tell the city that they’re all stupid, it can only intensify the political pressure to take action against the firm, deserved or not.

Brogan may spell out sound defenses against Mayor Duggan’s complaints, but the whole tone of this letter underscores the contempt everyone involved with the Emergency Manager process has for the citizenry they are supposed to serve:

From the day of his election, the Mayor was opposed to the Emergency Manager, who stood in the way of the Mayor’s exercise of authority, and to the professionals the Emergency Manager hired to assist the City with the bankruptcy.

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It’s not just the Mayor! The people of Michigan were also opposed to the Emergency Manager and literally repealed the law, only to see it reinstituted a month later. Perhaps people who feel this strongly about it — people who look a few towns over and see an ongoing human tragedy rooted in the same Emergency Manager law — aren’t the people to whip into a frenzy by telling them you know better than they do.

This isn’t the first time Jones Day went from zero to crazy in responding to criticism of their Detroit engagement. When a Michigan satirist questioned Orr and Jones Day’s unelected stewardship, they immediately made a public spectacle of the matter by writing an unhinged cease-and-desist letter that earned an entertainingly scathing response from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Can somebody over there issue a “count to ten” rule every time someone talks about Detroit? Everything about this matter really seems to get under their skin. and it’s not a good look.

Which brings us full circle to the unavoidable lesson of all this — even if it’s not a conflict, if something even hints at a conflict, it may still be imprudent to take the matter on.

Because you might end up so emotionally involved that you write schoolyard insults under your firm’s letterhead.

[1] Duggan won the primary as a write-in, that is. Detroit then holds a run-off of the top two finishers in the primary, where he defeated the second-place primary finisher by an even greater margin.

Jones Day law firm calls Mayor Duggan ‘a politcal hack’ [Fox 2 Detroit]

Earlier: Biglaw Firm Throws Even Bigger Hissy Fit
Remember Jones Day’s Hissy Fit C&D Letter? Here’s The Response!
Time For The Lawyers To Pick At The Carrion That Is Detroit

HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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