Their Own Defense

D.C.'s Clubby Attorneys Keep Corporate Work in the Flock

Robert S. Bennett, a former assistant prosecutor, instigated a referral web 20 years ago. (By Dennis Brack -- Bloomberg News)

In the beginning, there was Bob.

Twenty years ago, lawyer Robert S. Bennett represented Boeing in a huge government bid-rigging investigation. Conflicts barred him from handling all the work himself, so he passed parts of the sprawling case to lawyers he knew from Washington's tight-knit legal community.

By the time the next round of corporate mega-scandals came along in the early 2000s, the lucrative referral system was firmly entrenched. Having secured Enron and HealthSouth as clients, Bennett handed million-dollar offshoot work to friends, proteges and onetime colleagues from the U.S. attorney's office.

Hidden to all but insiders, a web of financial and social ties connects the top Washington lawyers who represent corporate targets of government investigations. Generations of lawyers who attended the same school, worked in the same prosecutor's office, or belong to the same social clubs mingle again as they defend companies and executives.

Among members of this community, it's as much whom as what you know. In a city with a defense roster flush with former prosecutors, it's often the personal connection -- to such lawyers as Bennett, Brendan Sullivan, Gerald Feffer or Reid H. Weingarten -- that determines who gets high-profile, lucrative cases.

"I feel very loyal to people," Bennett said. A District institution in his own right, Bennett works in an office overlooking the Treasury building, steps away from the headquarters of the Justice Department's fraud section.

"There is sort of this old-boy-and-girl network of old U.S. attorneys, and I must say I tend to think of them for business," said Bennett, a former assistant prosecutor whose closest colleague, Carl Rauh, ran the U.S. attorney's office in 1979.

The cycle begins with a phone call:

A company is fielding subpoenas from the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress. With little or no experience in criminal law, a chief executive or in-house lawyer reaches out to a veteran defense attorney with a history of handling government investigations. The attorney develops a strategy. He compiles a roster of executives who are in the government's sights. Ethics rules prevent him from handling all their cases -- in fact, some potential conflicts of interest would prohibit other members of his firm from handling them. So he considers other lawyers he trusts and refers some clients to them. A positive recommendation from a well-known attorney can mean a lot to a business executive facing years of litigation and possible prison time.

"You're probably better equipped to go out and buy a 50-inch plasma TV than you are to pick a white-collar lawyer. You don't have the resources; you just don't," said Robert D. Luskin in a phone interview from Paris, where he and a half-dozen lawyers he recommended are handling a corruption case involving French energy giant Total.

Such recommendations can be worth tens of thousands of dollars or more. Top practitioners such as Bennett bill from $850 to $1,000 an hour. Michael Levy, who worked for Bennett early in his career, parlayed a recommendation from his former boss into the task of advising scores of former Enron employees as witnesses in the long-running probe of the Houston energy trader. When it became clear that the government would try to charge some of them with crimes, Levy in turn referred some of them to other lawyers.

Altogether, the once-in-a-generation case brought Levy's law firm more than $15 million, according to court records.