Legal News

White Collar Lawyerspeak: ?We? Are Cooperating

By Amir Efrati

Some white-collar lawyering in the Madoff case had us scratching our head last night.

All along, Bernard Madoff’s lawyers have stated, without elaborating, that “We are fully cooperating with the government in its investigations.” The Law Blog assumed that by “we,” they meant their client.

It made some sense. Madoff allegedly confessed to both his sons and, later, to the FBI, that he perpetrated a Ponzi scheme that may have cost investors upwards of $50 billion.

And a person familiar with the matter said on Dec. 16 Madoff had a long meeting with prosecutors, the FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a lawyer for Lee Richards (currently the court-appointed receiver for Madoff’s U.K.-based trading facility) at the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan. (That could mean Madoff was giving information in a “proffer” session. Madoff’s lawyers won’t say.)

When asked Monday if the government’s motion to revoke Madoff’s bail would put a crimp on the oft-mentioned “cooperation,” Dickstein Shapiro’s Dan Horwitz (pictured) told the Law Blog that, “We are continuing to cooperate fully with the government’s investigations.”

But when asked if Madoff himself was cooperating, Horwitz declined to comment. “All we said is ‘we’ are cooperating and never said he is cooperating,” Horwitz said. (His partner, Ike Sorkin, told NYT something similar.)

Help us out, white collar gurus. What’s the purpose of this lawyerspeak? Do lawyers say “we are cooperating” even when their clients aren’t?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 06, 2009 (boomark / email).