Photo by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover

Therese M. Stewart (left), chief deputy city attorney for San Francisco, and Shannon P. Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, are honored for their work on civil rights for same-sex couples.

By the Editors of California Lawyer

The California Lawyer Attorneys of the Year Awards recognize lawyers throughout the state whose legal work made a profound impact in 2008. They include sole practitioners, city attorneys, and lawyers from large international firms. Their practice areas range from employment law and intellectual property to environmental law and appellate work. Among their successes: making school buses healthier for millions of California schoolchildren, protecting voters' rights during the recent election cycle, and winning a $184.1 million jury award in a patent- infringement case. In total, we identify 22 accomplishments in 13 areas of legal practice that reflect the breadth of the California State Bar.

Although it has become our policy not to consider previous CLAY winners, we made an exception for the landmark conservation agreement in our environmental law category. The nine attorneys who worked on that deal included two earlier honorees, Harry C. O'Brien and Joel R. Reynolds. Congratulations to all the winners.

-Chuleenan Svetvilas
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ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION

  
Michael E. Baumann and Rebecca J. Wahlquist
Kirkland & Ellis, Los Angeles

When Baumann and Wahlquist won an appeal last August on behalf of DirecTV, they changed the landscape for ADR in California and created a new arbitration option. Their client was locked in a dispute with a group of dealers who claimed DirecTV had improperly withheld commissions. After an arbitration panel ruled as a matter of law that the case could proceed on a classwide basis, Baumann and Wahlquist sought judicial review. Although it has been solid precedent that legal error is not a ground for reversal of an arbitration decision (Moncharsh v. Heily & Blase, 3 Cal. 4th 1 (1992)), the pair argued that the governing arbitration clause both required the arbitrator to properly apply California law and also provided for judicial review. The California Supreme Court confirmed that parties could contract for judicial review in arbitration (Cable Connection, Inc. v. DIRECTV, Inc., 44 Cal. 4th 1334 (2008)). As a result, parties in arbitration can benefit from the efficiency of ADR but reserve the opportunity for later judicial review in case the arbitrator makes an error of law. Jeremy B. Rosen of Horvitz & Levy in Encino, who filed an amicus brief in the Cable Connection case, has since won two other appeals based on the Supreme Court's ruling.
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ANTITRUST LAW

      
Ralph C. Alldredge  (left)
Sole practitioner, San Andreas
Richard P. Hill
Sole practitioner, San Francisco
E. Craig Moody
Sole practitioner, San Francisco

In a David-and-Goliath face-off between San Francisco's two main rival alternative weeklies, this legal team deftly made the unfair-competition case for the San Francisco Bay Guardian against the SF Weekly. Alldredge, Hill, and Moody convinced a San Francisco jury that the defendant was guilty of predatory pricing by deliberately selling display ads below cost in an effort to drive the Guardian out of business. The team successfully argued that cash infusions from the 16-paper parent chain, Village Voice/New Times Media, enabled the SF Weekly to set its advertising rates substantially below those of the Guardian even though those prices wouldn't cover the Weekly's operating costs. In March the jury awarded the Guardian $6.4 million in damages, which Judge Marla J. Miller later tripled to more than $18 million (including costs and attorneys fees) under the California Business and Professions Code. Judge Miller also issued a ten-year injunction prohibiting the SF Weekly from selling its display ads below cost.
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APPELLATE LAW

  
John F. Daum and Charles C. Lifland
O'Melveny & Myers, Los Angeles

In what was probably the worst "drunken-driving" accident in environmental history, the Exxon Valdez supertanker in 1989 ran aground on Bligh Reef in Alaska and spilled millions of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound. It took nearly 20 years for the legal aftereffects of the giant disaster to ripple to a halt, but in 2008 the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that Exxon Mobil Corp.—represented by Daum and Lifland—was liable for $507.5 million in punitive damages (Exxon Shipping Corp. v. Baker, 128 S. Ct. 2605). The amount, however, was only about one-tenth of what the company had originally been ordered to pay to fishermen, landowners, and others by the trial court. The high court's ruling also furthered its general trend toward reducing the amount of punitive awards, moving toward a 1-to-1 ratio between punitive and compensatory damages. This was truly a signature punitive damages case, and it could have major implications for environmental and other torts in the future.

Daum has represented Exxon for years, and he appears on the case briefs at the Ninth Circuit, which had gradually reduced the punitive award to $2.5 billion. Daum and Lifland together developed the appellate strategy, prepared both the successful petition and the merits briefs, and prepared Washington, D.C., partner Walter Dellinger to deliver the oral argument before the Supreme Court, which the two California attorneys attended at counsel table.

Jeffrey L. Fisher
Stanford Law School Supreme Court Litigation Clinic, Palo Alto

In 2008 Fisher, a criminal law specialist who joined the clinic as codirector in 2006, argued an astounding five cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. Clinic cofounder and codirector Pamela Karlan, who herself argued two high-court cases last year, calls him "the solicitor general of the criminal defense bar." Fisher's argument in Kennedy v. Louisiana led to the elimination of the death penalty for child rape in six states and the nullification of laws in a handful of other states that allowed capital punishment for non-homicidal crimes. In Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, which Fisher argued as a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine, the Court upheld punitive damages the oil company owed his clients but slashed the amount (see details under John Daum and Charles Lifland's Appellate Law award). He argued on the losing side in two cases: Burgess v. United States concerned when federal mandatory minimum drug sentences are triggered by prior state convictions, and Waddington v. Sarausad dealt with the availability of federal habeas relief when criminal juries are given incorrect instructions. A decision is pending in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts on the question of how the Sixth Amendment's confrontation clause applies to forensic evidence.
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CIVIL RIGHTS

      
Stephen P. Berzon (left), James M. Finberg, and Jonathan Weissglass
Altshuler Berzon, San Francisco

Under Berzon, Finberg, and Weissglass, teams of Altshuler Berzon lawyers beat back four attempts to undermine voting rights in three states during the 2008 national election. In Ohio, Berzon and his team filed a critical amicus brief for the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), successfully defending the rights of new voters to register and vote simultaneously after early voting had started. Republican officials had challenged Ohio's weeklong "window" period, arguing that voters must wait 30 days after registering before they can cast an early ballot. In another Ohio case, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Berzon and his team blocked a demand by the state GOP that the secretary of state turn over driver and motor vehicle records so that voters whose addresses didn't match the state's data files could be challenged.

In Colorado, Finberg's team on behalf of Common Cause, Mi Familia Vota, and the SEIU won a preliminary injunction to stop the state from purging the voter rolls of more than 30,000 names, purportedly duplicates or with wrong addresses. When the purging continued, Finberg's team obtained a temporary restraining order.

Weissglass and his team worked in northern Indiana on behalf of the local NAACP, the SEIU, and Lake County residents to keep early-voting sites open in the heavily Democratic and African-American cities of Hammond, Gary, and East Chicago. Republican officials had sued to close down the sites, claiming that they weren't properly approved by the county election board.

The Altshuler Berzon legal teams included Anne M. Arkush, Barbara J. Chisholm, Peter E. Leckman, Danielle E. Leonard, Stacey M. Leyton, and Rebecca H. Smullin.

Marwa M. Elzankaly
McManis Faulkner, San Jose

Thanks to Elzankaly, airline passengers whose names are on the federal government's "no-fly list" can now challenge the listing in court. She took Ibrahim v. Dept. of Homeland Security to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled last August that lawsuits against the no-fly list can proceed, giving federal trial courts the option of compelling the government to explain how the names on that list have been chosen. The decision reinstated the lawsuit filed by Elzankaly's client, Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University doctoral student and a native of Malaysia.

In January 2005 security personnel refused to let Ibrahim board a plane at San Francisco International Airport, handcuffing and detaining her for two hours. She eventually was released and allowed to fly to Malaysia the next day, but the U.S. government revoked her student visa and refused to confirm or deny whether Ibrahim's name was on the no-fly list or any other government watch list. Ibrahim sued the government for violating her constitutional rights, but the U.S. district court dismissed her case on the ground that federal law requires all challenges to an order of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA)—a part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—to be filed directly in a federal appeals court, where there is no right to a jury or discovery. However, the Ninth Circuit ruled that because the proscribed names were gathered not by the TSA but by the Terrorist Screening Center—a branch of the FBI, which is not covered by the same statute—federal judges can hear challenges to the no-fly list.

  
Shannon P. Minter
National Center for Lesbian Rights, San Francisco
Therese M. Stewart
Office of the City Attorney, San Francisco

In a case watched worldwide, Minter and Stewart urged the California Supreme Court to strike down the state's ban on gay marriages. In May, the court held that legislation limiting marriage to couples of opposite sexes violates same-sex couples' constitutional right to marry and to equal protection of the laws (In re Marriage Cases, 43 Cal. 4th 757 (2008)). In the case, which consolidated six related appeals, the 4—3 majority applied the heightened strict-scrutiny standard in a measured, 121-page opinion, reasoning that the underlying statutes giving same-sex and opposite-sex couples different treatment serve neither a compelling nor a necessary state interest.

Several longtime observers claimed that the argument was the most artful they had ever heard—noting both Stewart's command of case law and Minter's efforts in helping hone the issues and trial tactics.

Other California lawyers noted for their work on the case include Amy Margolin and Bobbie Wilson at San Francisco's Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, who were heavily involved in the trial strategies and logged hundreds of hours pro bono for the city since 2004, when Mayor Gavin Newson first ordered the issuing of same-sex marriage licenses. (At one point they jokingly presented him with a legal bill for $2 million.) Vince Chhabria and Danny Chou, both with the city attorney's office, were the primary drafters of the Supreme Court briefs, and they also helped fashion much of the trial strategy. San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera focused the legal fight and put the power and resources of the municipality behind it.

The legal battle continues for many of these attorneys, who are now involved in challenging Proposition 8, the state ballot measure passed last November that bans gay marriage.
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ELDER LAW

Stephen M. Garcia
The Garcia Law Firm , Long Beach

Making novel use of the Consumer Legal Remedies Act (Cal. Civ. Code §§ 1750–84) and California Health and Safety Code section 1430(b), Garcia secured more than $21.5 million in class action settlements with some of the largest long-term care facilities in the country. The actions alleged that the facilities—Longwood Management, Sunwest Management, Sun-Mar Health Care, Pleasant Care, Horizon West HealthCare, and Ensign Group—intentionally misrepresented that they provided a particular standard and quality of care but failed to offer it. The settlements included unique elements, such as requiring that unclaimed money in the settlement fund must be used directly by the facilities to improve resident care. They also require an independent monitor, selected by Garcia and paid by the companies, to periodically inspect the facilities to ensure compliance with the underlying agreements.

Garcia, a former criminal defense attorney, has specialized in elder abuse and long-term care complaints since taking his first such case 14 years ago.
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EMPLOYMENT LAW

Patrik M. Griego
Janssen, Malloy, Needham, Morrison, Reinholtsen, Crowley & Griego, Eureka

After logging more than 600 hours, Griego secured an award of more than $1 million to compensate a class of about 1,000 rural workers who had bunched and wrapped tulips for market but were misclassified as exempt from overtime pay. Other lawyers had turned down the case, citing the relatively small amount of money at stake in the claims for minimum wages—along with difficulties in representing the clients, most of whom were transient and did not speak English, and many of whom were undocumented. "Every hour of overtime represented $7 a day that they didn't get," says Griego. "To many people, that wouldn't matter much. But for them, it made a big difference."

San Francisco employment lawyer Michael Christian predicts Griego's win will have a lasting effect: "If lawyers realize that they can make a decent living doing this type of private enforcement, we'll ultimately see better working conditions for all agricultural workers in the state."

  
Laura L. Ho
Goldstein, Demchak, Baller, Borgen & Dardarian, Oakland
David A. Lowe
Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe, San Francisco

Ho and Lowe won a $105 million judgment against coffee mega-chain Starbucks, along with an injunction mandating changed employment practices, on behalf of baristas whose tips were pooled with supervisors' compensation in violation of state law. The pair went to trial in San Diego after A. Eric Aguilera of Bohm, Matsen, Kegel & Aguilera in Costa Mesa and Coronado sole practitioner Terry J. Chapko certified a class of 125,000 current and former employees who'd worked as baristas in California since October 2000. The trial court found last fall that Starbucks violated California Labor Code section 351, which prohibits an employer and its agents from collecting any part of a gratuity left for an employee by a patron (Chan v. Starbucks Corp., No. G1C 836925 (San Diego Super. Ct.)).

The case has potentially far-reaching implications for workers—including many in the restaurant, salon, and gaming industries in the 30 states that have similar tipping regulations. Although an appeal is slated to be heard this year, the decision has already sparked similar class actions against Starbucks in Massachusetts, Minnesota, and New York.
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ENTERTAINMENT LAW

  
Ruth E. Fisher
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Los Angeles
Brian J. McCarthy
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Los Angeles

In the $18.9 billion merger of two video-game giants, Fisher represented Paris–based Vivendi and its Los Angeles division, Vivendi Games, and McCarthy represented Santa Monica–based Activision. The complex cross-border deal took many months to negotiate before it closed last July. The result: Vivendi Games merged with a subsidiary of Activision, converting more than 295 million shares of stock in Vivendi Games into new shares of Activision common stock. In addition, Vivendi bought more than 60 million new shares of Activision common stock for $1.7 billion in cash and received a 52 percent ownership stake in the new company, Activision Blizzard.

According to George Rose, chief legal officer of Activision Blizzard, "The unusual aspect was figuring out how to involve a large outside entity [Vivendi] in the affairs of an independent public company [Activision]." The new company now claims to have 15 percent of the lucrative video-game market worldwide.
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ENVIRONMENTAL LAW

Representing Tejon Ranch
      
Matthew J. Bove and Harry C. O'Brien
Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass, San Francisco
Jennifer L. Hernandez
Holland & Knight, San Francisco

Representing the Environment
  
Gary A. Patton
Planning and Conservation League; Wittwer & Parkin, Santa Cruz
Joel R. Reynolds
Natural Resources Defense Council, Los Angeles

  
Julia A. Turrini and Mary J. Scoonover
Resources Law Group, Sacramento

  
Richard S. Taylor and William J. White
Shute, Mihaly & Weinberger, San Francisco

If it takes a village to raise a child, perhaps it takes a roomful of lawyers to save an ecosystem. At least that was the indication last spring when the Tejon Ranch Company negotiated a landmark agreement with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Sierra Club, Audubon California, the Planning and Conservation League, and the Endangered Habitats League. Under the pact, the company will set aside 240,000 acres of its vast tract of Southern California land under donated conservation easements, open-space designations, and public acquisitions. In exchange, the environmental groups agreed not to oppose three proposed developments on the remainder of the property. (The projects involve only about 10 percent of the original holdings.)

Reynolds, a senior attorney for the NRDC, says the deal involved the largest private landholding in California. According to press reports, the land preserved in the deal is eight times the size of San Francisco, and it includes desert, mountain, and valley habitats. Though some environmental groups remain concerned about the effect development will have on the California condor, Reynolds points out that Tejon Ranch still must comply with legally required environmental reviews should it proceed with plans to build on the land it retains. Conservation advocates say the terms of the agreement exceed what could have been gained through a series of lawsuits.

  
Richard T. Drury
Lozeau Drury, Alameda
James Wheaton
Environmental Law Foundation, Oakland

Drury and Wheaton led the plaintiffs team in a case in San Francisco Superior Court that invoked Proposition 65 to force two large school bus companies to reduce emissions from buses used to transport schoolchildren in California. Laura Baughman and Thomas Sims of Baron & Budd in Dallas, Texas, joined the two in leading the legal team. Under the larger of two settlements, reached last summer, Laidlaw Transit is required to spend an estimated $28.3 million to retrofit and upgrade its fleet of diesel buses. The other deal was reached in 2007 with Durham School Services, which also agreed to phase in new buses or repair older vehicles. Plaintiffs estimate the agreements will result in thousands of buses that are far healthier for their young passengers to ride in. Together, the two bus companies operate two-thirds of the school buses in the state. Laidlaw was sued in 2006 under the Prop. 65 right-to-know law for allegedly failing to provide warnings about diesel exposure to bus riders, and Durham was added as a defendant the following year.

Mary D. Nichols
California Air Resources Board, Sacramento

As chairman of the powerful state air-pollution board, Nichols leads the agency in implementing the landmark Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Last December, under her leadership, the board adopted what appears to be the most sweeping set of requirements in the nation for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. The plan—which still must be finalized with formal regulations—is intended to cut CO2 emissions back to 1990 levels by the year 2020, some 30 percent below what they would be if nothing were done. Just how far the coming rules will go remains to be seen, particularly in a struggling economy. But the Air Resources Board could potentially regulate all areas of energy usage, from changes in land use to the proper inflation of tires. At the heart of the plan adopted by the board are requirements that industries participate in a "cap-and-trade" program for carbon emissions, and the hoped-for implementation of new standards for cleaner cars and trucks in California.
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GOVERNMENT

  
Jeffrey B. Isaacs and Bruce K. Riordan
City Attorney's Office, Los Angeles

Public prosecutors throughout the state have used civil injunctions to limit gang activity. But as the practice has increased, so have civil-rights objections on behalf of people who say they're wrongly targeted.

To address such concerns, Chief Assistant City Attorney Isaacs created a petition procedure by which individuals subject to a gang injunction could be removed from the enforcement list without having to hire an attorney or file a civil action seeking declaratory relief. Riordan, the city attorney's director of antigang programs and operations, took on its implementation. In developing the protocols to administer the removal program, he worked closely with many city and community organizations. According to Riordan, the petition process is the first of its kind in the country. Last year, as the petitions continued to work their way through the new system, an ex–gang member became the first person in the state to be cleared from an enforcement list. Meanwhile, other California cities, including San Francisco, are putting in place similar gang injunction–removal processes.

The petition process "tells the community that we've heard them" says Anthony Pacheco, president of the Los Angeles police commission and a partner at Proskauer Rose.
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INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Edward G. Poplawski
Sidley Austin, Los Angeles

A litigation team led by Poplawski won a $184.1 million jury award last May against Hewlett-Packard for patent infringement. The verdict ended six and a half years of litigation.

Six Sidley Austin attorneys representing Cornell University sued HP in 2001, claiming the company was infringing on former Cornell professor Hwa C. Torng's patented technology for significantly increasing the efficiency and speed of computer processors. The university and its patent-holding entity, Cornell Research Foundation, sought $535 million from HP for ten years of royalties from sales of HP computers that use the patent, including servers and workstations. (The patent expired during the course of litigation.)

HP argued that Torng's right as patent holder had been exhausted by licenses and implied licenses that Cornell held with Intel and IBM, because each of those companies had produced some of the processors in question. Poplawski argued that the terms of Intel's license did not apply to HP because HP made the processors, and that there was no evidence of any license between Cornell and IBM. The jury found that HP had infringed the patent, but not willfully.

  
John B. Quinn and Michael T. Zeller
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges, Los Angeles

In a highly publicized jury trial for control of the Bratz doll franchise, Quinn and Zeller led a trial team of more than 15 attorneys to win a $100 million verdict for Mattel against MGA Entertainment. Last August the jury awarded Mattel $10 million for MGA's infringement of its copyright to concept drawings and prototypes of the dolls, and $90 million for MGA aiding and abetting a former Mattel doll designer in breaking his contractual and fiduciary duties (Bryant v. Mattel, CV-04-9049 (C.D. Cal.)).

Quinn and Zeller then sought a permanent injunction to shut down MGA's production, marketing, and selling of the dolls, which had sales estimated at $300 million in 2008. They also sought to transfer to Mattel the trademark rights to the Bratz name. In December U.S. District Judge Stephen G. Larson granted the lawyers' motions. The judge barred MGA from using the Bratz name, ordered a recall of Bratz dolls from stores, and required MGA to destroy plates and molds used to manufacture the dolls. Judge Larson stayed his orders pending resolution of MGA's posttrial motions.
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LITIGATION

Robert A. Mittelstaedt
Jones Day, San Francisco

As the lead defense lawyer for Chevron, Mittelstaedt won a remarkable victory last December when a federal jury in San Francisco ruled in favor of the petroleum giant that had been sued over an attack on protesters in Nigeria in 1999. The case, Bowoto v. Chevron Corp., had been brought into an American court under the venerable Alien Tort Claims Act. The lawsuit, which included claims for negligence, torture, and wrongful death, stemmed from the shooting and wounding of several Nigerians, two of whom died, during an incident at offshore-oil facilities operated by Chevron's Nigerian subsidiary and contractors. The plaintiffs claimed they were part of a nonviolent protest and that Chevron was responsible for the violence because it transported, paid, and supervised the Nigerian security forces that did the shooting. However, Chevron's defense team maintained that the company summoned the troops in response to a hostile invasion and that its workers had been at risk. Jurors took less than two days to unanimously find for the corporation.
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PRO BONO

Stacy R. Horth-Neubert and Jason D. Russell
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Los Angeles

Acting as co-counsel with the ACLU of Southern California, Horth-Neubert and Russell helped defeat a challenge to the Los Angeles School District's magnet program, which uses race as one of its admissions criteria. In 2005 the American Civil Rights Foundation (ARCF) filed suit against the school district, claiming that its magnet program violated Proposition 209, which prohibits racial or ethnic preferences in public education. But Horth-Neubert, Russell, and a team of Skadden attorneys reviewed the record of Crawford v. Board of Education of the City of Los Angeles, a desegregation case that resulted in a 1981 court-ordered integration plan for magnet schools. (Schools with court-ordered integration plans in effect are expressly exempt from Prop. 209.) With the attorneys' help on briefings and strategy, the ACLU was able to prove that the district was still under a court order to desegregate magnet schools. In December 2007 they won a dismissal of the case at summary judgment, which was upheld last December by the Second District Court of Appeal.

Mitchell Zimmerman
Fenwick & West, Mountain View

After working on the capital case for 22 years, Zimmerman got Henry Earl Duncan's death sentence overturned last June by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Duncan had repeatedly claimed over the years that his trial attorney acted incompetently and was to blame for the verdict, but to no avail. Zimmerman and his team, which included sole practitioner Richard C. Neuhoff, demonstrated that the seemingly airtight evidence—Duncan's bloody fingerprints at the crime scene—that had tied him to the 1986 murder of a restaurant employee did not necessarily prove his guilt. They tested Duncan's blood—which his trial lawyer had neglected to do—and determined that its type was different from that of the blood found at the crime scene. Zimmerman then argued that another assailant had been present and probably committed the actual killing. A three-judge panel concurred that Duncan's counsel was ineffective.

Although Duncan's murder conviction stands, the jury's finding of special circumstances—necessary for imposition of the death sentence—was reversed. Duncan may be subject to retrial on the special-circumstances issue, but Zimmerman—who logged more than 7,400 pro bono hours on the case—is confident that new trial counsel will be able to adequately represent him.
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PUBLIC-INTEREST LAW

Minouche Kandel
Bay Area Legal Aid, San Francisco

On behalf of a battered woman seeking a temporary restraining order, Kandel won a state appellate court ruling that led to 2008 legislation requiring trial judges who deny a TRO to explain their decision.

Specifically, the appellate court found that a Contra Costa Superior Court judge had abused his discretion when he denied Yuka Nakamura's request for a restraining order under the Domestic Violence Protection Act (DVPA), given the evidence included with the request. (In her declaration, Nakamura claimed she had suffered repeated physical abuse by her estranged husband.) As the appellate court observed: "[A] trial court's failure to explain the summary denial without a hearing of a protective order sought under the DVPA was in our view highly imprudent." (Nakamura v. Parker, 156 Cal. App. 4th 327, 336 (2007).) Then, with the ruling clearly serving as an impetus, the Legislature amended the Family Code (both the state Senate and Assembly cited Nakamura in their respective analyses); California now requires judges to provide a reasoned response to anyone whose request for a TRO is denied, along with notice of the petitioner's right to a hearing on the matter. The law took effect in January.

Stanley W. Levy
Manatt Phelps & Phillips, Los Angeles

In 2008 Levy launched the nationwide Holocaust Survivors Justice Network with Los Angeles–area legal services provider Bet Tzedek. Working in a full-time pro bono post, Levy created the network in response to the German government's announcement of a reparations program for Holocaust survivors who had been forced to work in Nazi-controlled ghettos.

In partnership with Bet Tzedek and using a clinic model it developed, the Holocaust Survivors Justice Network helped eligible clients apply for lump-sum payments. The network currently includes more than 100 law firms and law departments that conduct clinics in 32 U.S. cities, and there are plans to expand to Europe. The German government estimates that more than 50,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide—approximately 20,000 of whom live in the United States—may be eligible for payments. "A local organization could never have taken on a project of this size without Stan and Manatt Phelps," says Elissa Barrett, pro bono director of Bet Tzedek.