Judd N. Poffinberger, Jr.

Posted by Cliff Tuttle

Judd N. Poffinberger, Jr. passed away on December 2, 2009. He was described by the ACBA as the most senior lawyer at K&L Gates, a product of merger involving the Pittsburgh firm last known as Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, LLP. Poffinberger, who graduated from Harvard Law in 1949, had been the firm’s first associate.

CLT

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Every Story Has a Legal Backstory.

Case in point: Elin Woods is renegotiating her prenuptual agreement — with the help of lawyers.

CLT

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Kudos to Angela R. Winslow who just made Shareholder at Dickie McCamie & Chilcote . . .

She started at the firm as a secretary in 1989, as a divorced single mother. She attended Robert Morris College and Duquesne Law while she was working at her secretarial job, during which time she remarried and had three more children. She co-chairs the family law group at the firm — a specialty to which she must undoubtedly bring a great deal of knowledge, experience and compassion.

It goes to show: you don’t have to look very far from home to find a hero.

CLT

Hat tip to Tribune Review.

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Pittsburgh Legal Newslog: Iran Alleged to have Confiscated Human Rights Lawyer Sharin Ebadi’s Nobel Peace Prize Medal.

SUMMARY: Iran has seized the contents of a safety deposit box allegedly containing the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize medal of human rights lawyer Sharin Ebadi.

Jurist, November 28, 2009.

Comment: Lawyers around the world applaud and support this heroic member of our profession. For Jurist reprint of a short autobiography by Ms. Ebadi, click here. For Jurist archive reports on Ms. Ebadi, click here.

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Pittsburgh Legal Newslog:Third Circuit Upholds School Policy of Banning Religious Holiday Songs.

SUMMARY: The Third Circuit held, following precedent, that a school ban on religious holiday songs does not violate the Establishment Clause by creating an anti-religious cultural regime.

Jurist, November 27, 2009.

COMMENT: This holding may be good law, this Court had no choice in this case, but exclusively secular Christmas music isn’t worth much artistically. Its like hot chocolate without the chocolate.

CLT

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What is a “High Powered Lawyer” and How Do I Get Me One?

SUMMARY: A high powered lawyer, like a good egg, may not everything he/she is cracked up to be.

In an attempt to control the political damage, Pittsburgh Mayor Ravenstahl gave KDKA talk host Marty Griffin an exclusive interview announcing his separation from his wife the other night. In the interview, the Mayor announced that he wouldn’t be talking about the subject anymore and that he had hired Philadelphia attorney Richard Sprague to protect the privacy of himself and his wife.

If this strategy was intended to get the matter behind him, Ravenstahl may have chosen the wrong journalist. Griffin has been talking about nothing else and will probably keep doing so on his radio show long after listeners start begging him to stop. Perhaps the plan was to let Griffin induce mass boredom.

However, what caught my ear was the media description of Sprague as a “high powered lawyer” and a “bulldog.” The Trib more modestly stated that he was “high profile.”

So what does a high powered lawyer do that a low powered lawyer doesn’t?

Since Richard Sprague gained national attention as the successful prosecutor of the murderers of UMWA presidential candidate Jock Yablonsky in 1970, he has been involved in quite a few headline-grabbing cases, mostly involving the criminal side of the bar. Most recently, he defended Senator Fumo, who will probably be spending all or most of the rest of his life as a guest of the Commonwealth. Maybe Mr. Sprague was not too high powered on that one.

By Mayor Luke’s account, “high powered” means someone who writes letters to journalists that publish rumors and inuendo that scare them to death with litigation threats.

Too bad the kid passed up the opportunity to go to law school. If he’d made it to the second year, he might have learned that the law allows the media to publish rumors and a whole lot more about public figures as long as it doesn’t become so personal that malice can be inferred.

Under these circumstances, Mr. Sprague’s powers to stop journalists from reporting rumors are probably not much higher than the average lawyer.

Too bad.

CLT

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1963: The Year When Everything Changed.

SUMMARY: Lawyers and other calculating people can learn a lot from the Madmen.

We’ve just finished experiencing the year of 1963 (Season 3) through the glass darkly of the TV series about an archetypal Madison Avenue ad agency, “Madmen”. Of course, that was the year when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22. Early in the season we learn the ominous news that Roger Sterling’s daughter will be married on Saturday, November 23. Storm clouds quickly began to gather over the Draper marriage, while the avuncular Duck Phillips (who arranged the firm’s merger with the Brits in Season 2, but was thrown out because Don Draper threatened to quit if Duck stayed) surfaces in the employ of a competitor and makes a play to steal Peggy Olson and Pete Campbell, the firm’s two rising stars.

A key event in Season 2 was that big power play when Pete Campbell tests his metal against the old pro, Don Draper, and loses. Very educational. But these were not the only enemies made within the firm that year. Draper refuses to talk to Sterling for forcing him to sign a contract. Olson has legitimate reasons to harbor grudges against everyone. The Brits aggravate the situation with high-handed moves typical of trans-oceanic management. Nobody seems to have loyalty to the firm or anyone else — except themselves.

But, in the crowning event of Season 3, the Sterling Cooper heroes set aside their differences and join forces against their Brittanic overlords to pull off the coup de gras of their lives. Upon learning that they were about to be merged once again (this time into a mega-agency), Sterling, Cooper and Draper engineer a way out of their contracts and take along Campbell, Olson and the incomparable Joan Holloway (the tall redhead in the red dress) plus a few other key players. They roll a big chunk of the firm’s accounts out the door in the middle of the night on dollies piled high. How they did it should be mesmerizing to all young turks working for biglaw — firms that resemble Sterling Cooper in many critical ways.

So next year it will be the new firm of Sterling, Cooper, Draper & Campbell against their old colleagues. Will the Brits shake off the loss of all that talent? Will the palace revolution kill the mega-merger?. I smell lawsuit. I smell blood.

My colleague, Adrian Baron, the Nutmeg Lawyer, draws a series of morals for lawyers from these stories, mostly the negative kind. [Eg., don’t smoke, drink or over-sex yourself to death like Draper and Sterling do.] However, I believe there is more for lawyers to learn, much more.

Lawyers should observe the inscrutable Draper carefully. He is rarely drawn into revealing himself through small talk. He doesn’t tell stories. He doesn’t talk about clients. As a matter of fact, he never talks much at all until all the cards are down — whereupon he springs something brilliant. He never wastes an idea by expressing it prematurely. And he is very, very cagey. “Who knows why people do what they do?” he asks, while deftly avoiding explaining his own motivation. He manages to remain mysterious and unpredictable to everyone, even his wife. Forget co-workers — he has no friends among them, let alone a closest friend.

Pete Campbell is a Draper wannabee. Alienation is the chief among these traits. Campbell tries to ignore his father’s death, refusing to grieve or mention it to anyone. Neither can get truly close to their wives. As a strange compensation for this fear of intimacy, they engage in sexual predations.

So don’t go too far in modeling yourself after Don Draper. This particular madman is dead inside. When he learns that Kennedy has been shot, he doesn’t seem to care. At least he has found the perfect job for his talents: he enchants and seduces.

Then again, he might have made a pretty good lawyer, too.

CLT

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Beyond the Milky Way and Forever.

SUMMARY: Media contracts are expanding to all time and all space. But is it enough?

WQED in Pittsburgh has drawn the attention of the Wall Street Journal and others for its forward-looking contract terms. Media contracts reserving world-wide broadcast or publication rights are so 20th Century, it seems. After all, television signals are broadcast outward into the universe and travel billions and billions of light years away, presumably without end.

WQED General Counsel, Jacqueline Thomas, says that there hasn’t been any pushback on contract language permitting WQED “to reproduce and publish the same throughout the universe in perpetuity, in any and all media now known or hereinafter devised, including without limitation, all forms of television, home video, digital download, radio and print.”

We wonder whether Thomas, too, is a fan of “Stargate Universe”, currently appearing on the PsyFi Cable TV Channel on Friday nights at 9. A spin-off of the long popular Stargate series, the new show expands our consciousness of the vastness of the universe. A stargate is a portal that instantaneously connects with other stargates placed elsewhere in the universe, through one of those “worm holes”. The Ancients, an advanced civilization that visited Egypt during our antiquity and designed the pyramids, put a stargate aboard an unmanned spacecraft launched into deep space thousands of years ago. It is now passing through realms beyond reach of any technology, except, of course, a stargate. A crew of humans boarded this ship through the stargate to escape an attack, but does not have the power necessary to dial the stargate to take them back to Earth.

It is good to know that if the crew of Stargate Universe (or any other sentient being in the universe) ever watches WQED that the broadcast is protected from piracy. Or is it? Is there any court on earth whose jurisdiction extends beyond this planet? Maybe we had better take care of that, pronto.

Of course, the WQED contract language only applies within the farthest reaches of this universe and time as we know it. It does not apply to parallel universes, dimensions beyond the familiar four or five or states of being without dimensions, including time. It does not apply to the afterlife, or perhaps more correctly, the afterlives. It all makes you realize how pitifully limited we humans are and how little control we really have. We’ll just have to be satisfied with enforcing contracts within the temporal realm — for now.

A hat tip to the Disciplinary Board of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who brought this fascinating tid-bit to our attention in its entertaining monthly newsletter. It is always nice to know that when we Pennsylvania lawyers do something creative or innovative, the Disciplinary Board is watching. That universe at least has its limits.

CLT

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Staying Home With the Flu

SUMMARY: Go to work with the flu and you may be in big trouble; stay home and you will be in big trouble.

One associate at K&L Gates ended up on the managing partner’s list, the kind of list that may be terminal. Yes, he came to work with flu-like symptoms, despite a memo explicitly directing K&L G people to stay home. Then he spent two days in meetings, including with a pregnant mother.

Of course, as everyone who has ever worked in a law firm as an associate knows, there is probably another side to the story. A directive to stay home from the commanding general in far-off Seattle (or someplace like that) may not have the immediacy of the orders shouted from the next office in Pittsburgh.

Still, with a little planning, you could probably have arranged to bill 10 or 12 hours that day from your computer at home, couldn’t you?

Couldn’t you?

CLT

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Sue ’em!

New London Connecticut was recently informed that, after tearing down the town, there has been a change in plans.

CLT

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CLIFF TUTTLE has been a Pennsylvania lawyer for over 45 years and (inter alia) is a real estate litigator and legal writer. The posts in this blog are intended to provide general information about legal topics of interest to lawyers and consumers with a Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania focus. However, this information does not constitute legal advice and there is no lawyer-client relationship created when you read this blog. You are encouraged to leave comments but be aware that posted comments can be read by others. If you wish to contact me in privacy, please use the Contact Form located immediately below this message. I will reply promptly and in strict confidence.

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Judd N. Poffinberger, Jr.

Every Story Has a Legal Backstory.

Kudos to Angela R. Winslow who just made Shareholder at Dickie McCamie & Chilcote . . .

Pittsburgh Legal Newslog: Iran Alleged to have Confiscated Human Rights Lawyer Sharin Ebadi’s Nobel Peace Prize Medal.

Pittsburgh Legal Newslog:Third Circuit Upholds School Policy of Banning Religious Holiday Songs.

What is a “High Powered Lawyer” and How Do I Get Me One?

1963: The Year When Everything Changed.

Beyond the Milky Way and Forever.

Staying Home With the Flu

Sue ’em!

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