Legal News

Prop 8 Work Brings Olson, Boies to Philadelphia

By Brian Harris

By Gina Passarella
Of the Legal Staff

The Equality Forums Global GLBT Summit is being held in Philadelphia this week and will near its culmination Saturday night with a dinner honoring two noted lawyers who surprised some by coming down on the same side of the gay marriage issue.

Now, famed litigators David Boies and Ted Olson will come together Saturday to be honored by the Equality Forum with its International Role Model Award for their representation of two plaintiffs challenging Californias Proposition 8 a ban on gay marriage.

David Boies, managing partner with Boies Schiller & Flexner, and Ted Olson, a current Gibson Dunn & Crutcher partner and former U.S. Solicitor General under George W. Bush, had been adversaries in 2000 when Olson represented Bush and Boies represented former Vice President Al Gore in Bush v. Gore.

Neither is a stranger to big-impact, high-profile cases. And perhaps no case was more closely watched this year, and a decision still so eagerly awaited in, than Perry v. Schwarzenneger.

Abbe Fletman, a shareholder with Flaster Greenberg, has long been on the national board of governors of the Equality Forum and will be introducing Olson and Boies Saturday night.

As a trial lawyer, Im deeply honored to be introducing David Boies and Ted Olson, Fletman said Thursday. As I will say on Saturday, to me they are rock stars.

Fletman said if someone were to have called her a year before the Prop 8 cases began and said Ted Olson would be representing a plaintiff, she wouldnt have believed them.

I think it says something very positive for civility in the profession that two people who are often professional antagonists could come together and work as co-counsel in a single case, Fletman said. I think thats how the profession should work.

The Equality Forums week-long summit concludes Sunday with a National Same-Sex Commitment Ceremony followed by parties and a mass.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on April 30, 2010 (boomark / email).