|
|
 |
|
| |
| League of Justice |
|
|
| |
| Lawyering Among
The Stars |
|
| Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro find
glitzy niche |
|
Anna Nicole Smith likely despised Bruce Jeffer.
His firm, Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro LLP,
(JMBM) represents one of Smith’s many courtroom
enemies – in this case, the son of her oil
tycoon husband.
While Smith’s case against her son-in-law, E.
Pierce Marshall, may take years to work out now
that both parties have died, the litigation has
accomplished one thing. It helped make Jeffer’s
firm famous. Representing headline-grabbing
clients has brought paparazzi visibility to JMBM.
James Bond, for instance. To be exact, the firm
did not really represent the fictional spy
character, just the film company – MGM Pictures
– that had produced a lot of the Bond films.
They went up against Sony and its effort in the
late 1990s to launch some films based on some of
the earliest Bond novels by writer Ian Fleming
-- and won.
Or like computer mogul Michael Dell, founder,
chairman and CEO of Dell Inc., who Jeffer
represented in Dell’s forays into the hotel
business – one of JMBM’s specialties. Jeffer,
who is always circumspect about discussing
client’s cases, will not provide further
details.
The 25-year-old law firm and its 150 attorneys
concentrate on entertainment, sports and hotels,
but those types of cases are just part of its
business. Much more time is spent on high-end
regional cases in Southern California, including
corporate law, securities work and general
commercial litigation. Two years ago in one of
the largest patent infringement suits in the
country, JMBM won a case that resulted in a
$1.35 billion settlement against Medtronic Inc.
The headline-garnering lawsuit involved a Los
Angeles spine surgeon, Dr. Gary Michelson, who
claimed he had not been reimbursed adequately by
the medical devices company in its sales of some
of his inventions.
Then there’s the smaller and more frequent cases
that settle somewhere between what his client
wants and what the other side offers. “There are
things we won we should have lost, and things we
lost we should have won. That is one of the
vagaries (of law),” Jeffer says. “Sometimes you
are not going to get what (your client) wants –
there is no way. Sometimes to get a guy $25
million when the property is worth $40 million
is a victory because he needs it and the market
is not strong.”
While it prides itself in offering clients
enough expertise to provide one-stop shopping
for relatively complex legal problems, JMBM is
also small enough to avoid the bureaucratic
treatment that comes with some of the country’s
largest law firms.
“Sometimes the size is daunting,” says Jeffer.
“Some the law firms these days are the size of
big accounting firms.” Big cases handled by
those firms, like New York’s Skadden, Arps,
Slate, Meagher & Flom or London’s Clifford
Chance, might involve documents stretching
millions of pages and hundreds of hours of work
by junior lawyers – and a big-bucks price tag.
JMBM, on the other hand, aims at a mid-size
market. “I would not consider us a large law
firm. I would consider us niche-size, a large
regional firm,” Jeffer explains. Massive cases
“can be boring,” he adds. “We shy away from that
kind of work.”
That focus is reflected in the company’s bottom
line, too. While Jeffer will not reveal his
company’s specific profit figures and refuses to
participate in industry rankings such as those
maintained by American Lawyer magazine, he says
profits have been “relatively consistent” for
the past three years. “We have not fired
anybody,” he adds.
By Scott Williams
Return to
October 2007 Issue
|
|
|
|
