The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

Bhutto's Assassination Leaves Lobbyists in Limbo

The assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto Thursday will likely add to the chaos in Pakistan, complicating an already difficult lobbying effort.

Bhutto's party, the Pakistan People's Party, has been represented by Burson-Marsteller and its affiliates, including BKSH & Associates and polling firm Penn, Schoen, Berland & Associates, since last January. Registrations filed with the Department of Justice last year show the party agreed to pay a one-time fee of $75,000 for polling services, along with $28,500 per month for other services. Among the companies' duties: coordinating meetings for Prime Minister Bhutto with U.S. officials. No one at Burston-Marsteller could be reached for comment on Bhutto's assassination Thursday.

The turmoil in Pakistan has already had fallout on K Street. Cassidy & Associates withdrew from a $1.2 million contract with Pakistan's government last month, after President Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule. Read Legal Times' story about that here. The embassy still has a $55,000 per month contract with Van Scoyoc Associates, led by Mark Tavlarides.

"This is a terrible day for Pakistan and this is very sad," Tavlarides says, adding that it's too early to say anything else about the assassination or the events surrounding it. He says he hasn't received calls from the Hill yet, but "I think eventually what you’ll see people are going to want to see investigations" into who is responsible.

The Morning Wrap

Bhutto Assassinated: Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was killed Thursday in an attack on a political rally near the capital, Islamabad. Witnesses say that Bhutto was fired upon before a blast, apparently caused by a suicide attacker, rocked the rally, fatally injuring her and killing at least a dozen more people. (Read more here: NYT, WaPo, WSJ, AP)

Neck and Neck and Neck: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Democratic Senator John Edwards are dialing up their campaigns eights days ahead of the Democratic contest in Iowa. In the final stretch, polls show all three are within arms length, with Clinton and Obama slightly ahead of Edwards in the most wide open race in half a century, The Washington Post reports. Safely removed from the forced gentility of the holidays, attack ads are flying and stump speeches are issuing from every corner of the state.

Housing Swoon: A gauge of U.S. home prices shows they are continuing to dive, underscoring the severity of a housing slump that could threaten consumer spending, according to the The Wall Street Journal. S&P/Case-Shiller home-price indexes, released yesterday by credit-rating firm Standard & Poor's, reflect a 6.7 percent dip in home prices from a year earlier in 10 major metropolitan areas.

Benefitting Whom: Employers can reduce or eliminate health benefits for retirees when they turn 65 and become eligible for Medicare, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said Wednesday. The new policy establishes two classes of retirees, with those under 65 receiving more comprehensive benefits and those older than 65 more limited benefits or none at all, The New York Times reports. The new policy creates exemptions from age-discrimination laws for employers that roll back benefits.

This Week in Legal Times...

Fire up the Yule log, lower yourself into an easy chair and lose yourself in this week’s Legal Times. The holidays haven’t slowed us down any.

We’ve got Attila Berry following the starting-salary race. Who will be the first to $200,000? Williams & Connolly is within spitting distance, having bumped first-year associate salaries up to $180,000. Who’s next? As Dan Binstock, a legal recruiter with BCG Attorney Search, told Legal Times, “These salary wars are like the game of chicken, and it would not surprise me if select New York-based firms upped the ante by raising starting salaries to over $200,000.”

Jeff Horwitz documents the exertions of indicted hotel magnate Stanley Tollman, who has taken the extraordinary step of hiring lobbyists to shake the Justice Department. Tollman settled in London shortly before being charged with dozens of counts of bank and tax fraud in 2002. He’s got lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic, and now he’s got BGR Holding, formerly Barbour Griffith & Rogers, on his side. His PR agent has paid BGR more than $1.8 million to drum up a public policy and media campaign decrying American prosecutorial abuse and the current U.S.-U.K. extradition treaty.

Joe Palazzolo covers the Senate Confirmation hearings of Deputy Attorney General nominee Mark Filip, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. It took about 20 minutes, he writes, before senators asked the inevitable: Is waterboarding torture?

Also in the Legal Times, coverage of the CIA tapes hearing in U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr.’s courtroom last week, a look at readers’ picks for the best books of 2007, and Tony Mauro reports on the possiblity of cameras in the high court. Dig in.

All They Want for Christmas...

For some 19,500 inmates serving time for crack cocaine offenses, this holiday season carries the hope of a reduced sentence. The Washington Post today has a story about one-time slugger Willie Mays Aikens, a poster child for what many consider to be a vast -- and vastly unfair -- disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences. The U.S. Sentencing Commission’s recent decision to ease crack sentences by two levels, or an average of 27 months, could help Aikens, who is serving more than 15 years for possession and distribution of 64 grams of crack.

A former first baseman and heavy-hitter for the Kansas City Royals, Aikens saw his sports career go to ruin in the 1980s as he battled cocaine addiction. He was arrested in 1994 and charged with six counts of distributing cocaine base. He maintains to this day that police prodded him to cook the cocaine into crack so they could get him on a steeper sentence. Within hours of the commission’s decisions, Aikens was on the phone with his lawyers, trying to figure out how to proceed.

Did Charlie Wilson Win the Box Office War?

"Charlie Wilson's War," the film about the former lobbyist starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts, fought the box office to a draw over the holiday weekend. Variety reports that the well-reviewed film took fourth place and made $9.6 million. Surely more lobbyists than that went to the movies?

Either way, things are slow enough today for a stroll down memory lane. Check out some of Wilson Associates registrations on behalf of clients like Lockheed Martin -- unless you're planning to skip work this afternoon and go see the movie.

Holiday Merger

Two regional players confirmed they’re merging. St. Louis-based Husch & Eppenberger and Kansas City, Mo.-based Blackwell Sanders will ring in the New Year with a combined partnership. The merger should be completed by late January, with a name for the combined firm to follow.

The new firm will have 630 attorneys, with revenues estimated to top $275 million next year. The firm will concentrate on commercial litigation.

Blackwell Sanders, which has a Washington office of about eight lawyers, ranked No. 179 on the 2007 AmLaw for revenue. Husch & Eppenberger was ranked No. 175.

Morning Wrap

Saved by Exports: A growing number of U.S. manufacturers are making up for slow domestic sales by expanding exports, says The Washington Post. U.S. sales in China are reportedly up 17 percent this year.

Piping In Profits: Warren Buffet has agreed to buy the majority of industrial conglomerate Marmon Holdings from the Pritzkers, reports The Wall Street Journal. The price is $4.5 billion, for a company that produces products like plumbing pipes and railroad tank cars.

Tough in Texas: For the first time in the modern history of the death penalty, 60 percent of all executions took place in Texas, says The New York Times.

HIV Testing: New Jersey appears about to adopt a new law that makes HIV testing part of routine prenatal care for all pregnant women, reports The Associated Press. The law would require newborns to be tested when the mother has tested positive or her HIV status is unknown.

There's No Way This is Accurate

In what we strongly expect is going to turn out to be at the very least a currency conversion error, Philippine news sources are reporting that the Philippine government has signed a six-month, $50-million-dollar FARA lobbying contract with Covington & Burling.

That's right — $50 million dollars.
 
The contract, which is being heavily criticized in the Philippines' leading English language daily by a leading Philippine senator, would be to “promote the interests of the Republic of the Philippines with the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Government on a range of political, economic, and security issues.”
 
Its reported gargantuan size has caused some heavy speculation on the part of the Philippine senator mentioned above, Mar Roxas II, who suggested that its magnitude might indicate it's intended to “soften resistance to some strain of martial law.”
 
“If they can’t defend this in Plaza Miranda or any market in the country, then they should junk it altogether,” Roxas said in a statement.

Covington & Burling declined to discuss any potential contract, and the Philippine embassy in D.C. couldn’t be reached for comment.

No matter what the size of the contract, it would be a significant coup (though of a different sort that Roxas' implies above) for a firm whose only current FARA client is the Republic of Cyprus.

We’ll try to update this once the news gets a little more solid. Until then, Covington & Burling staff should try not to get too excited about what all of this is going to mean for their Christmas bonus.

UPDATE: Turns out there were two extra zeros on that lobbying contract. According to to an update in a later story in the Daily Inquirer, the contract isn't yet signed, and is worth only $500,000 for six months. Still, the President of the Philippines' legal counsel says the nation needs Covington's lobbying help -- to combat "leftists" and "protestant bishops" that are battling the nation's interests in Congress.

Covington and Burling appears to have just signed itself a very lively client.

Former McDermott Partner Gets 30-Day Suspension

In a case that has taken a decade to resolve, attorney Michael Romansky received a 30-day suspension yesterday from the D.C. Court of Appeals relating to overbilling issues while he was a partner and leader of the health care practice at McDermott Will & Emery in the 1990s. He has since left the firm.

Although the court previously remanded the case for additional factual findings by the Board on Professional Responsibility, the court ultimately agreed with the board’s recommended 30-day suspension. However, Judge Noel Anketell Kramer wrote that she favored a 60-day suspension because a 30-day suspension was “unduly modest.”

In 1994, Romansky overbilled two clients by disguising new premiums as additional hours on clients’ bills, the decision stated. The court found there was confusion at the time about McDermott’s new billing policy, but the court took a harder line on actions Romansky took to deceive both a client and McDermott after the firm launched an internal investigation against him. Romansky dictated a letter to a client’s secretary, which was purportedly from the client, and told the secretary to backdate the letter and fax it to him so he could submit it to McDermott as evidence that the client believed his billing practices were justified, a D.C. Bar Counsel investigation found.

Romansky, who doesn’t currently list any firm affiliation with the D.C. Bar, and his attorney, Earl Silbert of DLA Piper, didn’t respond to requests for comment today. A McDermott spokeswoman also didn’t respond about whether Romansky resigned or was fired from the firm.

At Least There Aren't Nametags

The BLT enjoys taking a comparative approach to lobbying regulations and scandals, so we were curious to see that a whole new regime of lobbyist restrictions is on the way — in Israel.

Many of the new regulations in a bill passed by the Knesset plenum would be old hat for anyone familiar with the system in D.C. For the first time, for instance, lobbyists will be required to register their clients with the government, and legislators are mulling over a prohibition of lobbying by high-ranking political party officials.

Then there are the nametags.

Should the bill go through — and the Jerusalem Post seems to think it will — lobbyists will be required to wear a tag stating their name, firm, and client at all times when they’re in the Knesset.

These rules would all add up to an abrupt change for Israeli lobbyists.

Israel, the article notes, is one of the last countries in the world that doesn't regulate its public policy advocates. But in recent years, the need to do so has become more apparent: By way of demonstrating the sheer number of Israeli influence peddlers, the Jerusalem Post quotes Knesset officials who estimate that there are probably "a couple hundred" people who cycle through the Knesset seeking to sway votes.

On the BLT's desk is a well-thumbed copy of the 2006 edition of Washington Representatives, containing 1993 pages of names in excruciatingly small font.

Israel, you've got a long way to go.