Legal News

The Lawyer of the Hour: White & Case?s ?Overly Tenacious? Tom Lauria

By Ashby Jones

Alas, the recent journey of the Indiana pension funds through the federal courts has ended. Tuesday afternoon, the Supreme Court declined to take the appeal of the pensioners, who were looking to put a halt to the sale of Chrysler to Fiat. Click here for the per curiam opinion; here for the WSJ article; here for the NYT’s.

In its order, court said simply that the funds had not “carried the burden” of proving that their grievances merited the court’s attention.

It’s a setback not only for the Indiana funds, but White & Case lawyer Tom Lauria — who had carried the legal water for the funds throughout the battle. Still, according to this WSJ profile, the lawyer will likely to remain a thorn in the side of the administration’s automotive task force. A hodgepodge of GM bondholders have asked him to represent them in a challenge to GM’s bankruptcy filing.

Lauria, a 48-year-old creditor-side bankruptcy lawyer — and the head of the practice at White & Case — represented Carl Icahn when the financier tried to buy the bankrupt Pan Am in 1998. He squeezed a $2.5 billion payout from the Adelphia bankruptcy in 2004 on behalf of some of the country’s biggest banks. He also shepherded energy company Mirant Corp. through a grueling, 30-month bankruptcy, for which he earned $900 an hour.

We’ve never heard a lawyer described as “overly tenacious,” but Lauria earned the remark from Judge Michael Lynn of the Northern District of Texas, who presided over the Mirant case. Lynn says that Lauria sometimes focuses “on the justice of his client’s position to the exclusion of the merit of the opposition’s arguments.”

Paul Hastings’ Richard Chesley puts it differently: “I don’t know many lawyers in the bankruptcy practice who take the idea of zealous representation of their client as seriously as he does.”

As for Lauria, he’s chagrined by more than just the outcome of the Chrysler/Fiat situation. He says his experiences of the last month “cause me to worry that there is something very wrong with the system,” and he says he wonders “whether our judiciary is today able to fulfill its constitutional mission to ensure that the rule of law prevails — particularly in the face of perceived crisis.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 10, 2009 (boomark / email).