Legal News

Spotlight on Ken Feinberg: The Special Master of America

By Ashby Jones

The term “special master” is just so cool, connoting, as it does, a rarefied mix of power and wisdom. Were we ever called that in any context, we’d probably make a point of telling our decedents to slap it up on our gravestone.

Kenneth Feinberg has become the king special master, presiding over every American crisis of the last decade. Most recently, he was tapped to serve as President Obama’s “pay czar.” In that role, he’s tasked with the thorny job of setting pay at bailed out companies.

The Washington Post on Thursday contains a very revealing profile of Feinberg, a Washington lawyer.

Opens the story:

Partly through his volition and partly as an accident of history, Washington lawyer Kenneth Feinberg has become a ubiquitous personage when it comes to national emergency. Beginning in 2001, Feinberg was the U.S. government’s special master tasked with setting compensation for injured victims and the families of those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks, a job he describes as “the most harrowing experience of my professional life.”

In 2007 he distributed the money donated to victims of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech and to bereaved families.

And just now, in response to the nation’s worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Feinberg is the Obama administration’s special master for executive compensation — the pay czar — charged with capping salaries at firms receiving the biggest chunks of bailout money under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

How’d he get to this exalted spot? A native of Brockton, Mass., Feinberg got his undergraduate degree from UMass, then went to law school at NYU. He clerked for former New York Court of Appeals chief judge Stanley Fuld, worked as a federal prosecutor, and later served on the staff of Ted Kennedy.

After law school Feinberg clerked for the chief judge of the state of New York, Stanley H. Fuld, then worked as a federal prosecutor and later as chief of staff for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Before founding his own firm — The Feinberg Group — in 1993, he helped found Kaye Scholer’s Washington office of Kaye Scholer.

But his first significant brush with mediation came about a decade earlier, when Brooklyn federal judge Jack Weinstein, invited Feinberg to help settle a long-standing dispute between thousands of Vietnam War veterans claiming injury from exposure to Agent Orange, and chemical companies that were involved with manufacturing the herbicide. Feinberg worked with both sides and a settlement of $180 million was reached. It was then, according to the Post, that he discovered the peculiar satisfaction of mediation.

“That one case, Agent Orange, changed my entire professional career,” says Feinberg, who found himself negotiating claims involving asbestos, breast implants, heart valves and other products. He launched a firm devoted to dispute resolution, work that was challenging and lucrative.

The Post story ends with a natural question: What’s next for Feinberg? We love the answer:

Please, let the special master move on to routine paid work; let the special master have plenty of time with his family. Let nothing else happen, please, that would require the special master to occupy yet another public role in yet another crisis. “I agree with that!” exclaims the special master. “I keep saying that. I hope this is the last emergency.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 14, 2010 (boomark / email).