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Lawyers Worry About the Silliest Things!

Oh lawyers, always worrying about whether the id. is capitalized and other such picayune matters. Belts and suspenders, dotting i's and crossing t's and all that.

But get this: apparently some of you are concerned that the election in November may not go off perfectly. In Florida, of all places! So much so that Berger Singerman attorney Charles Lichtman has assembled his own private army of perfectly coiffed legal first-responders:

The Obama campaign has 1,000 volunteer lawyers in Florida, in 55 of the 67 counties, said Chuck Lichtman, statewide lead counsel for the Obama campaign. Five thousand are expected to be signed up by Election Day for poll-watching.

In previous Florida elections, there have been reports of people having to wait in line for hours, of voting machines registering the wrong vote and of people being turned away from the polls for not having two forms of identification or for incorrectly being listed as felons.

"We're not hiring litigators," said Lichtman, a partner at Berger Singerman in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "The public doesn't want litigation. We're doing election protection. We know election law backwards and forwards and we've been looking at every issue, hard, for the last year."

The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee have also sent 11 out-of-state lawyers to Florida to monitor voting problems. Leading them is David Sullivan, who took a leave of absence from his job as legal counsel for the Massachusetts governor. He has been stationed at Obama Florida headquarters in Tampa since Aug. 11. Sullivan was dispatched to Florida in 2000 and Ohio ? another battleground state ? in 2004. "Our mission is to protect the vote," he said.

Also leading up the efforts in Florida are Stephen and Richard Rosenthal, two brothers who are Miami lawyers ? one at the law firm Podhurst Orseck and the other leading his own appellate law firm.

Additionally, Mark Herron, a Tallahassee, Fla., election law expert, has been hired as state counsel for the Democratic National Committee. Herron ? who was featured in the HBO film Recount ? gained some notoriety in 2000 after his law firm, Akerman Senterfitt, fired him, allegedly for associating himself with Al Gore.

Fellas, fellas - turn that frown upside down!

What could possibly go wrong?

Full post as published by South Florida Lawyers on September 29, 2008 (boomark / email).