When #MeToo Came to Biglaw--And Got It Wrong

Examining more of the history behind Bill Voge's exit from Latham & Watkins.

Bill Voge via Latham & Watkins website

Some day, the official history of the #MeToo era will be written. When it is, I hope it will include — alongside the rightly taken scalps of Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer — the names of people who were unjustly caught up in its more hysterical expressions. One of the first names on that list should be William Voge.

As regular readers of Above the Law (or people who follow the legal profession) likely know by now, the married Mr. Voge was forced to resign as chairman of Latham & Watkins this past March after a sexting scandal with an also-married woman 18 years his junior.

At the time, the reporting on his resignation was thin and, unsurprisingly, biased in favor of his accuser.

Enter the Wall Street Journal, whose paper version I still read every morning, because middle age is awesome. In the kind of sensitive, detailed reporting that is all too rare these days, reporter Sara Randazzo — who clearly didn’t get the memo that the man is always supposed to be the bad guy in these stories — told the story of what actually happened here.

In short, Mr. Voge got screwed — and he never actually screwed anyone.

First, a little background. It all started when Mr. Voge, trying to be a good guy, agreed to mediate a dispute between one Andrea Vassell — who would later prompt his downfall — and someone she had accused of sexual misconduct from 20 years before, a man named James Lane. Mr. Voge and Mr. Lane were old friends, and Mr. Voge thought he might be able to broker some sort of reconciliation between them.

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To be clear — Mr. Voge never worked with Ms. Vassell. He had no personal or professional relationship with Ms. Vassell. He had never even, throughout this entire process, met her in person. Apparently, he was just trying to help an old friend.

But no good deed goes unpunished.

Last November, he was in Chicago for work and started emailing with Ms. Vassell. The emails turned to texts, and then snowballed into the following, which was the sum total of their relationship:

At first, the messages were innocent, discussing what he was doing that week in Chicago. The talk turned flirtatious, then sexual.

The steamy back-and-forth went on for more than an hour. Going to bed around 11 p.m., Mr. Voge said he recalled thinking, “What the heck did I just do?” Later in the week, he did it again by text. They also emailed and spoke briefly by phone. They talked about meeting in person but never did.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is Mr. Voge’s entire sex scandal. In less than a week, he appears to have engaged in a little bit of dirty talk over text and by phone with a woman he had never met in person. For that, he lost his career and his reputation.

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You may be wondering why, if that was all there was, things got as bad as they did.

For that, here are just a couple of excerpts from the Journal article about what Ms. Vassell did next:

  • “After Mr. Voge both called her and texted her to apologize for his actions and say that he did not want to be in touch with her anymore, she responded as follows in a text: ‘You are insane if you think I am not coming after you with everything I have,’ she wrote.”

  • “Ms. Vassell continued sending emails about Mr. Voge to New Canaan Society [a Christian businessmen’s group to which Mr. Voge and Mr. Lane belonged] members, Latham partners, the head of a competing law firm and, later, to a few media outlets. She also emailed Jami Voge, Mr. Voge’s wife. From December to April, Ms. Vassell sent more than 90 emails to Mr. Voge. In some, she said he had done nothing wrong and that she was upset she couldn’t be with him. In others, she lashed out at him. Many included sexual fantasies. In one, she said she had pleaded guilty to harassment in 1998.”

I know that these days, we’re not supposed to express sympathy for people like Bill Voge. After all, he’s a rich white man who held one of the most plum jobs in the entire BigLaw world. But that, of course, is nonsense — a sad commentary on our too-fractured age.

Imagine what it must have been to be like Mr. Voge. Because of what appears to have been a very brief lapse in judgment over the course of less than a week, a lapse in judgment that did not include sexual contact with anyone or even happen in the workplace, he lost his job and his reputation.

Latham’s response to this scandal was all too predictable in the #metoo era, which is all sin and no redemption. On March 20, it accepted his resignation and immediate retirement and issued a statement saying that his “lapses in personal judgment made continued service as chair untenable.” This, despite the fact that Ms. Vassell had even emailed Latham’s General Counsel at one point to say that she “wanted to be clear that I am not accusing Bill Voge of any kind of sexual misconduct from my perspective. We were consenting adults.”

In the current climate, maybe Latham didn’t have a choice. Maybe when your chairman is caught in a sexting scandal in 2018, you have to cut him loose — no matter how much good he’s done for the firm, no matter how good a man you believe he is.

And that’s a sad thing. What Mr. Voge did was stupid, but we all do stupid things sometimes. (If people didn’t do stupid things sometimes, no one would need defense attorneys.) He didn’t touch anyone, he didn’t threaten anyone, and he didn’t harm anyone. He just engaged in a foolish, consensual flirtation with another woman with whom he had zero professional relationship and it cost him his career.

For the Madame Defarges of the #MeToo era, that was enough.


Justin Dillon is a partner at KaiserDillon PLLC in Washington, DC, where he focuses on white-collar criminal defense and campus disciplinary matters. Before joining the firm, he worked as an Assistant United States Attorney in Washington, DC, and at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. His email is jdillon@kaiserdillon.com.