I'll Bet He Sits in an Aeron Chair

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

Tim Zinnecker (stage right), over at South Texas College of Law in Houston (just down the road from the former Enron Field, and where they have a special interest in following this) pointed out this Business Week squib about Daniel Petrocelli and O'Melveny & Myers running up a tab of $70 million dollars defending Jeffrey Skilling.

Three reactions:

1.  Gordon Smith was agonizing over whether to invest in a $600 Aeron chair.  Gordon, I'll bet the paralegals over at O'Melveny sit in Aeron chairs.  But do they have work-life balance?

2.  $70 million was roughly the revenue of my entire 300-lawyer Prestigious But Regional Midwestern Law Firm (as Belle Lettre would say) in the year before I left the partnership (1991 or so).

3.  I hope like hell my colleague Pamela Metzger here at Tulane doesn't see this and choke on her beignet.  Pam's Criminal Defense Clinic has been working against tremendous odds to bring an entire criminal justice system out of the Katrina rubble.  What might be done with a fraction of that money?