Live From PREX: Preet Bharara Might Still Be U.S. Attorney If Only He’d Returned Trump’s Call

He may have feared being 'Comey’d'; instead, it seems he may have been canned for petty nonsense.

Preet Bharara (Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

The PREX Conference is the annual gathering of in-house lawyers and legal operations professionals hosted by Zapproved. I’ve encouraged legal ops folks to attend in the past because frankly the content is almost exclusively for in-house legal personnel. The conference was in Chicago and attendance was up this year to over 300 people.

Sessions and presentations this year were fantastic as usual. I moderated a panel on defensible deletion, and I got into a public debate with David Cohen from Reed Smith about the pros and cons of BYOD policies. Other topics included retired Judge Shira Sheindlin, Craig Ball, Maura Grossman, and Jonathan Redgrave on how to navigate the special master process. An interesting discussion was had in Not Your Typical Legal AI Session about the discoverability of the data of AI products, and other sessions focused on driving eDiscovery costs down, the challenges of mobile device management, data privacy, and of course, a judicial forum. There was also Speed Mentoring (think speed dating for mentees), and a new feature this year was the eDiscovery 101 track that consisted of short, focused, TED-like presentations on a variety of essential topics. There were technology spotlights on several products useful to in-house practitioners as well.

The keynotes were also fantastic. Trailblazing Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge and noted author and speaker Bernice B. Donald delivered a real one-two punch, first with her keynote discussing her life-journey from the segregated South to her elevation to the Sixth Circuit, and then, as part of a panel discussion discussing diversity and inclusion in the legal industry.

Another highlight was Facebook VP and Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal’s interview of Preet Bharara. True story: There’s a reasonable chance that had Bharara returned President Trump’s phone call in 2017, he might still be U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

The way he told it, after the election in 2016, Bharara was invited to Trump Tower and president-elect Trump personally asked him to stay on as U.S. Attorney. There were witnesses. At that meeting Trump asked for Bharara’s digits. After the inauguration, Bharara received a message to return a call from Trump. In the spirit of maintaining the independence of his office, Bharara did not call Trump back. Not long after, the White House called Bharara to tell him Trump is replacing nearly all Obama holdovers. Surely this didn’t apply to him; he had gone to Trump Tower. Trump asked him to stay, right? Nope. The White House later confirmed Trump wanted him gone, too.

No one, not even Bharara, truly knows if he was fired for not returning Trump’s call. But thank goodness for the principled stand Bharara took on maintaining his office’s independence. He may have feared being “Comey’d” (to coin phrase); instead, it seems he may have been canned for petty nonsense.

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Bharara’s book, Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime, Punishment, and the Rule of Law, was also front and center during the interview. He strikes me as the right kind of person to be a prosecutor, and frankly, he altered my views of the traits and characteristics of the typical prosecutor. Bharara talked about policing Wall Street, trying terrorists, and the ethical quandaries confronting prosecutors. Most interesting is his take on the awesome power prosecutors wield — the power to accuse and then influence judgment and punishment — and how to temper that power with fairness and mercy. Prosecutors who celebrate guilty verdicts, he suggested, should probably find another job.

And while there are clearly bad people in the world who do bad things, they are still people. It doesn’t make sense, he said, to define them solely by their actions. While victims clearly deserve justice, there is little recognition of the larger impact of crime and punishment — on families and on societal fabric. Bharara said that in the advanced society in which we live, he cannot believe that the best solution to crime that we have come up with is how long someone is deprived of their liberty.

Bharara came to PREX to talk about Justice in the Digital Age — at least that was the title of the presentation. I think he left the audience with some other more important things to think about.

Lastly, the folks at Zapproved are simply some of the best people in the industry. Thanks to Monica Enand, Brad Harris, Chris Bright Jennifer Bantlemanm and Michelle Ruch for inviting me, and thanks to the entire Zapproved team and the sponsors who helped make it happen. Next year the conference is in Philadelphia. Mark your September 2020 calendars!

And don’t forget to nominate your peers for the Corporate eDiscovery Hero Awards. Winners will be revealed during LegalWeek in February 2020.

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Mike Quartararo is the managing director of eDPM Advisory Services, a consulting firm providing e-discovery, project management and legal technology advisory and training services to the legal industry. He is also the author of the 2016 book Project Management in Electronic Discovery. Mike has many years of experience delivering e-discovery, project management, and legal technology solutions to law firms and Fortune 500 corporations across the globe and is widely considered an expert on project management, e-discovery and legal matter management. You can reach him via email at mquartararo@edpmadvisory.com. Follow him on Twitter @edpmadvisory.