Legal News

Storied Hollywood Attorney Pierce O?Donnell Facing Indictment

By Dan Slater

Plaintiffs’ attorney Pierce O’Donnell listens to testimony in San Diego Superior Court in October 2005. O’Donnell represented consumers in the class action lawsuit against Sempra Energy and its two utilities. Photo: Associated Press

The trial lawyer has to embody the skills of a great filmmaker. He’s a writer — he writes his own material, he outlines what his witnesses are going to say. He’s the director — he directs the performances. He’s the producer — he has to make all the physical arrangements. And he’s the actor. — Pierce O’Donnell, L.A. trial attorney, in an interview with Fortune

The L.A. Times is reporting that trial lawyer Pierce O’Donnell, who has been called “the new Perry Mason in Hollywood,” is set to be indicted on criminal campaign finance charges. The LAT reports that a federal grand jury has been probing whether O’Donnell violated federal campaign laws by asking employees of his law firm to contribute to the 2004 presidential campaign of John Edwards and then reimbursing those who did.

O’Donnell, 61, has reportedly indicated that he’s willing to plead to a misdemeanor charge and pay a large fine, but prosecutors in the Thomas O’Brien’s U.S. attorney’s office in L.A. have been insisting that any deal would require him to plead guilty to a felony, which would end his storied legal career in California.

That career, in addition to including clients like Lockheed, NBC and MGM (among several other studios), has entailed cases representing Faye Dunaway in a wrongful termination suit against Andrew Lloyd Webber, and columnist Art Buchwald in his suit against Paramount in the “Coming to America” case, in which Buchwald claimed that a screenplay treatment he wrote with a producer and sold to Paramount was the source material for the movie.

That representation was the basis for a 1992 book O’Donnell co-authored called “Fatal Subtraction: The Inside Story of Buchwald v. Paramount.” O’Donnell also co-authored the screenplay for the Steve Guttenberg movie “Home Team.” And there’s more: His first book of poems was “Dawn’s Early Light,” and most recently he published “In Time of War: Hitler’s Terrorist Attack on America.”

“There are very legitimate questions as to how one can justify imposing a professional death penalty over this type of conduct,” said George Terwilliger III, in an interview with the LA Times. Terwilliger served as the No. 2 official in George H.W. Bush’s Justice Department and played a key role on George W. Bush’s legal team during the Florida election recount.

In 2006, O’Donnell (Georgetown, Yale law) pleaded no contest to state charges for similar conduct in the 2001 mayoral race of James K. Hahn. As a result of the misdemeanor conviction, he was sentenced to probation and ordered to pay more than $155,000 in fines and penalties.

We’ve placed a call to O’Donnell’s office, and will let you know if we hear back.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 24, 2008 (boomark / email).