Need Some Legal Muscle? Choose the Champ

For every chief executive settling in after the holidays' reveries, the New Year will offer its grim realities, among them the potential for new lawsuits.

Well, the January issue of The American Lawyer magazine offers a primer on the best litigation departments at the large firms. It includes the magazine's selection of "Litigation Department of the Year," based on entries submitted by the law firms on AmLaw's list of the top 200 grossing law firms in the country.

The contest (the magazine's fourth) actually occurs every two years, and is based on a firm's litigation record between January 2006 and July 2007. The magazine asked for no more than five examples of great work in six categories, from pretrial to appellate to pro-bono work.

But brevity, alas, is not a word in the vocabulary of most lawyers. "The responses filled two dozen crates and have occupied most of our waking hours since the August 1 deadline," wrote Aric Press, the magazine's editor in chief.

The finalists pleaded their cases in person, and the magazine checked their clients for references.

And the winner is ... Kirkland & Ellis!

What set this law firm apart, it seems, was sheer volume. "Kirkland tried 30 cases to verdict, winning more significant trials than any other firm in our contest," according to the magazine.

Among those was a $1.53 billion jury verdict for Lucent Technologies against Microsoft Corp., won by patent litigator John Desmarais. (The presiding judge later threw out the verdict.)

But most corporations would rather find a result before trial, and the Kirkland lawyers proved adept at that, winning a pretrial dismissal for Union Carbide in a case brought by Gerry Spence, on behalf of residents in Colorado who claimed a uranium-mining site had poisoned them.

As national trial counsel for Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company in Katrina-related litigation, Kirkland has also faced off against Mississippi trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs.

If Kirkland's name rings a bell, but a more notorious one, it may be that you are recalling its role in representing Morgan Stanley in a 2005 slugfest with Ronald Perelman in Florida state court, in which Morgan Stanley was sanctioned for discovery abuses and Kirkland was fired shortly before trial.

Kirkland seems a surprising choice, given the high profile trials undertaken as part of Merck & Co.'s strategy of litigating each case of claimed injury from its painkiller Vioxx.

The American Lawyer chose Williams & Connolly of Washington, D.C., as a finalist for litigation department of the year, because it brokered Vioxx's $4.85 billion settlement in December.

But another of the finalists, the litigation department of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, may have the most delicious bragging rights: When Skadden persuadd a judge to dismiss a $90 million breach of contract suit by Andrew Beal, the billionaire banker got so mad that he took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal that asked:

Q: When is a contract NOT enforceable according to its terms?

A: When it is in the state of New York.

The ad asked lenders and their lawyers to join Beal in seeking reconsideration of the decision.

But Beal later sent Scott Musoff, the Skadden lawyer who won the case, a handwritten note of congratulations: "I have instructed my people to call you on all future New York litigation matters."

In litigation, as in love and war....

by Karen Donovan