Legal Help and Advice Blog

LBers, take this as a cautionary tale. Next time you try to shake down a television personality in exchange for a promise not to take potentially damaging information about said celebrity to the press, remember Joe Halderman. For the love of all that’s good and holy, remember Joe Halderman.

Halderman, a television producer, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to trying to extort money out of David Letterman. According to this AP story, Halderman will do six months in jail and perform community service.

Halderman pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny after being accused of demanding $2 million to keep quiet about Letterman’s workplace love life.

“In September of 2009, I attempted to extort $2 million from David Letterman by threatening to disclose personal and private information about him, whether true or false,” Halderman said in court, reading a prepared statement in court.

“I feel great remorse for what I have done,” Halderman said.

Halderman remains free on bail until his sentencing, set for May 4. In addition to the jail sentence, he agreed to 1,000 hours of community service; he would have faced up to 15 years in prison if convicted at a trial.

Through his lawyers, Letterman thanked Manhattan prosecutors for pursuing the case. “When they became involved in this case, I had complete faith that a just and appropriate result was inevitable,” he said in a statement they read outside court.

Some comments made by Halderman’s lawyer, Gerald Shargel, make us a little sad to see this case go away so soon, however. “We had a novel defense here involving complicated legal issues. I was very excited about the defense,” said Shargel to the AP. “But there would be a long road ahead of us, and considering the risks and the rewards and the need for Joe to put this behind him and get on with his life, those needs were paramount.”

Photo: AP

Perhaps we’re suffering from a brain cramp here, but we really can’t remember a recent federal appellate-court nomination that garnered as much immediate controversy as has President Obama’s recent nomination of Goodwin Liu to the Ninth Circuit. (LBers, help us out here — who are we forgetting about?)

Almost immediately after the 39-year-old Berkeley law professor was nominated, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, questioned the nomination. In an interview last week on Fox News, Sessions, said that Liu “believes the Constitution is something judges can manipulate to have it say what they think culture or evolving standards of decency requires on a given day.” Bloggers and editorial writes have also been on Liu’s case.

But now a backlash to the backlash has cranked up, it seems. According this post on the BLT Blog, one of Liu’s students, Berkeley 3L Jonathan Singer, has started a blog in support of Liu’s nomination.

“He needs people who support him to speak up for him,” Singer told the BLT Blog, noting the custom for judicial nominees to maintain silence in public pending their hearing. “When people don’t stand up for nominees of this quality, who would add this much to the federal bench, then those nominees won’t be put forward in the future.”

Other support has come from perhaps less likely corners. Clint Bolick, the director of the Goldwater Institute, recently sent this letter to Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) supporting Liu’s confirmation.

And a fellow Berkeley professor — John Yoo (heard of him?) — had this to say about Liu, according to this LA Times article: “he’s not someone a Republican president would pick, but for a Democratic nominee, he’s a very good choice.”

Not exactly a full-throated vote of support, but something.

Single-name recognition. Here are some of the very few people who (arguably) have it: Madonna. Ichiro. Oprah. Bono. Morrissey. Ronaldinho. Cher. Here are some of the many many people who don’t: Paul Simon, Frank Thomas, Joan Rivers, Larry Craig, Dianne Feinstein and Randy Jackson.

And what about Lindsay Lohan? Or should we say, simply, “Lindsay”? Does she have it?

Her lawyer seems to think so. And whether she does or not might be central to a lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of Lohan in Nassau County, N.Y., Supreme Court. (Click here for the NY Post article.) Lohan alleges that one of those E-Trade baby commercials — the creepy/funny ones in which babies sing, talk to each other about golf, and herald the virtues of E-Trade — misappropriated her “name and characterization.” She’s asking for $100 million.

The commercial itself is a relatively new addition to the E-Trade catalogue. It’s the one in which the E-Trade star, a baby boy, is chatting with a baby girl. The joke is that the two babies are chatting it up as if they’re in their early 20s; she’s mad at him for not calling the night before. (His excuse not calling: he was on E-Trade, “taking control, like a wolf.”) “And that milkaholic, Lindsay, wasn’t over?” the girl then asks, prompting a different, spazzy little girl to jump in the frame on the boy’s side. “Milk-a-what?” the newcomer asks. Click here for the YouTube video, which is vastly more entertaining than our write-up.

In any event, Lohan’s lawyer, Stephanie Ovadia, told the Post that the Lindsay baby was intended to refer to her client, who “has the same single-name recognition as Oprah or Madonna.”

“They used the name Lindsay,” Ovadia said to the Post. “They’re using her name as a parody of her life. Why didn’t they use the name Susan? This is a subliminal message. Everybody’s talking about it and saying it’s Lindsay Lohan.”

In addition to the money for her client, Ovadia wants an injunction halting the commercial’s airing as well as “every last copy of the commercial.”

Ovadia also said she’s heard from many people willing to help her prove her case. “They’ve said that Lindsay [Lohan] was the first person they thought of when they saw the commercial,” Ovadia said. “People seem very willing to help.”

E-Trade did not return a call placed by the LB requesting comment.

LBer’s, we’re going to refrain from comment on this one, but you shouldn’t.

Photo: AP

You can take the Law Blogger out of the law group, but you can’t take the law out of the Law Blogger.

Let us explain: Peter Lattman left his post as the writer of this blog some two years ago for the greener pastures of the private-equity world. Nevertheless, his very nice story today confirms to us that he’s still got a big place in his heart for BigLaw and its denizens.

Lattman, at the end of his story on the big class action suit that’s dogged big private equity for two years, mentions the firms handling the work for the PE firms, and serves up a great nugget from the plaintiffs’ lawyer on the case:

Each defendant is represented by a different law firm. All told, there are more than 50 lawyers from prominent firms such as Sullivan & Cromwell and Kirkland & Ellis working on the case. Several defense lawyers involved in the case estimate total billable hours thus far are well into the tens of millions of dollars.

“The big law firms like us because we’ve kept them busy during the downturn,” said K. Craig Wildfang, a lawyer at Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi in Minneapolis, one of the lead attorneys in the case. “And we’ve still got a ways to go.”

Of course, Wildfang’s quote hints at a little truth: BigLaw loves to trash the plaintiffs’ bar, but of course it’s largely the plaintiffs’ bar that, at the end of the day, is responsible for BigLaw partners’ handsome draws.

And Lattman’s story? It chronicles the case filed two years ago against 11 of the world’s largest PE shops, alleging that the group colluded in a “collaborative, collectivist scheme” to carve up the market for huge acquisitions. The case, fundamentally an antitrust suit, was brought by former shareholders of the acquisition targets.

About the suit, launched in Massachusetts federal court, Lattman writes:

[P]rivately the buyout executives say [the suit] become a huge hassle, forcing the firms to turn over millions of pages of documents and emails. Dozens of the industry’s most prominent executives, including those from Bain Capital and TPG, are giving depositions—some for as long as seven hours. Plaintiffs’ lawyers have taken more than 30 depositions over the past 10 months, including that of Rich Friedman, the head of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s private-equity business. Roughly 40 more depositions are set to be taken, including those of Alex Navab, the co-head of North American buyouts at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Blackstone Group boss Stephen Schwarzman, whose deposition was scheduled for last month but was canceled because of a snowstorm.

That’s right fellas — lawsuits ain’t a lotta fun.

Blackstone and KKR, whose shares are traded publicly, have said in securities filings that the lawsuit is without merit. Representatives for the other nine private-equity firms—Bain Capital, Carlyle Group, J.P. Morgan Partners LLC, Providence Equity Partners, Warburg Pincus, Thomas H. Lee Partners, TPG, Permira and Silver Lake Partners—declined to comment.

The lawsuit followed a Justice Department investigation into possible anticompetitive behavior launched in 2006. Lattman reports that investigation continues, according to people familiar with the probe.

Photo: iStockPhoto

It was inevitable, right? After enduring the pain of losing lots of money in the Bernard Madoff fraud — and having their identities made public — the Madoff victims are the latest target of an online scam.

A Web site called i-sipc.com is apparently mimicking the official website of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation, an agency created by Congress to help customers of collapsed brokerages.

SIPC, which spread word of the scam Tuesday morning, has been dishing out funds to certain Madoff victims who qualified. The victims had to provide the agency with lots of financial data.

That’s where “I-SIPC,” or International Security Investor Protection Corporation, comes in. The I-SIPC Web site is soliciting Madoff victims to submit claims, which SIPC (the real one) is warning could result in “phishing” or other identify theft problems. The phony group claims to be based in Geneva and also maintains that it has ties to the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund, among others.

In one section of the bogus Web site, SIPC warned, the group includes a supposed testimonial from a Madoff victim who purportedly received funds from the organization. The site also falsely claims to have collaborated with Interpol to recover $1.3 billion in Madoff money from a hideout in Malaysia.

SIPC said it will seek to have the violator prosecuted to the extent the law allows. We’ve asked SIPC whether any Madoff victims have been victimized by the scam and will let you know when we hear back.