Legal News

More On the Mark Levy Tragedy

By Nathan Koppel

We wanted to double back to the tragic story of Mark Levy, the head of the Supreme Court practice at Kilpatrick Stockton who killed himself yesterday in his D.C. office.

WaPo has a story out today that Kilpatrick had laid off Levy. Thursday would have been his last day at work, WaPo reported.

"Mark Levy was well known and highly respected for his successful appearances before the Supreme Court," Kilpatrick's co-managing partner said yesterday in a statement. "We offer our deepest condolences to his family."

We caught up with some lawyers who knew Levy. Tom Goldstein, of Akin Gump, says Levy was very well regarded in the clubby, elite Supreme-Court bar. "We’re unlikely to ever know exactly what happened, and his family deserves its privacy, but it [could be that] the hard-edged business of the law exacted a terrible cost yesterday," Goldstein says.

Levy, according to WaPo, was discovered by a co-worker at about 8:00 a.m. in his 11th-floor office. He evidently left a note at his home saying he loved his family and instructing his wife on how to handle family finances; the attorney's 20-year-old son found the note and called police.

After a stint in the Solicitor General's office, Levy joined Mayer Brown, where he was a partner. He later joining the Justice Department under Clinton and did a stint at Howrey.

"Mark was an able lawyer and a good guy," says key Federal Circuit ruling for a Native American client. The court upheld the right of the Tohono O'odham Nation to pursue its claims that the US mismanaged the Nation's trust property. Based on those rulings, Englert says, Levy's career appeared to be going well. "Things like this don't have a single cause," he says. "Stuff could get under his skin, but nothing to the extent that made me think this would happen."

Mayer Brown partner Andrew Frey, who worked with Levy at Mayer Brown and at the Solicitor General's Office, describes him as shy and reserved. "He was not an outgoing, glad-handing kind of person," Frey says. "But the news was a complete shock."

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 01, 2009 (boomark / email).