Legal Armies, in Search of New Battles

Comcast and Time Warner argue that rescuing Adelphia from bankruptcy protection will benefit its customers and creditors and make their own companies more competitive. As part of the deal, Comcast and Time Warner, the nation's two largest cable providers, also plan to swap a number of cable systems, allowing each to amass bigger regional "clusters" of subscribers.

Critics such News Corp.'s DirecTV fear the deal will increase Comcast's and Time Warner's leverage and make it more expensive, or impossible, for competitors to get access to regional sports networks that broadcast baseball, basketball, hockey and other games.

DirecTV, a satellite television provider, and RCN Corp. of Herndon, a smaller cable operator, have asked the FCC to bar Comcast and Time Warner from making exclusive deals with regional sports networks. Media Access Project echoes DirecTV's concerns and wants several other conditions on the merger, including barring Comcast or Time Warner from blocking subscribers' access to legal Web sites and protection for political speech and independent programmers.

Comcast and Time Warner dispute the need for any conditions. They argue that they have long-standing policies of providing unfettered Internet access to their customers. They also say that the regional sports issue is not specific to the Adelphia deal and should not be addressed in the FCC's merger review.

One of the tactics that Media Access Project's allies have used in the Adelphia merger is to flood the FCC with nearly 12,000 comments from activists arguing that the two big cable companies should not be allowed to get bigger.

"We have to pick our shots very, very carefully. . . . We are small, we use unconventional tactics, and we have limited resources, so we have to live off the land," Schwartzman said. "Sometimes it's because we can demonstrate that there is a public interest . . . to an issue that otherwise appears to be a fight between the very rich and the very wealthy."

Of the nearly 16,000 filings on the merger as of Friday afternoon, there were 479 core documents in the case, and the lawyers tracking the matter read them with the zeal of Talmudic scholars, taking copies home at night.

Many other of the city's leading communications law firms are also working on the merger. Adelphia is represented by Willkie Farr Gallagher, Time Warner by Fleischman and Walsh LLP, and DirecTV by Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis LLP.

Groups as varied as the Communications Workers of America, Americans for Tax Reform and Marco Island Cable Inc., which runs a cable system on an island south of Naples, Fla., have all weighed in, adding to the thousands of pages written in favor of and against the merger.

While such disputes often seem as subtle and arcane as theological arguments about how many angels fit on the head of a pin, they can influence what people watch on TV, how they access the Internet and what they pay for phone calls.

"On the head of every pin rests a billion dollars," said Howard J. Symons, a communications lawyer at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo PC and a former adjunct professor who taught telecommunications law at George Washington University.

The vast amount of money involved and the complexity of telecom cases are factors that lead observers to conclude Washington's telecom law industry won't shrink much more.

Wiley, who declined to comment on the Adelphia deal, said he was not worried about the practice shrinking, noting the profusion of technological developments in communications.

"The technology-agile lawyer can do well," said Wiley, whose firm represented NTP Inc. in its patent infringement lawsuit against the maker of BlackBerry wireless devices and won a share of the $612.5 million settlement. "We've got 75 communications lawyers here and I can tell you they are all busy."