Two Indianapolis-based law firms, one of them black-owned, have teamed up to create a powerhouse team they believe will attract clients wanting more diversity in their legal representation.

The alliance reflects a growing trend that found its way here in early June when partners at Bingham McHale and at minority-owned Coleman Stevenson announced that they would work together to represent Fortune 500s and other companies.
Gerald Coleman, a partner at Coleman Stevenson, said the alliance allows smaller, minority-owned firms a better opportunity to represent large corporations.

"From our standpoint, an alliance allows us to handle complex issues for larger corporations, and it removes any capacity issues that may come up," he said. "This way, Fortune 500 companies are not concerned about giving work to a smaller firm and wondering if (it) will get done."

Coleman said his firm was sought out for an alliance by larger firms seeking to satisfy the needs of their clients. Coleman Stevenson, a practice with seven attorneys, is dedicated solely to business and corporate legal services.
"Corporations are recognizing the importance of diversity in legal representation," Coleman said. "It's on the front burner for some of these firms."

Attorneys at other minority-owned firms in the Indianapolis area agreed with Coleman.

"These big firms start scrambling for minority lawyers when corporations put out statements encouraging firms to hire minority counsel in order to keep them as clients," said Kenneth T. Roberts, senior partner at Roberts & Bishop, considered the largest black-owned firm in Indiana. The firm specializes in corporate defense.

With eight attorneys on staff, Roberts & Bishop's client list includes American Airlines, GlaxoSmithKline, Motorola, Quaker Oats and American automakers General Motors Corp., Chrysler Corp. and Ford Motor Co.

"It's just good business to have diverse lawyers," Roberts said.

Coleman said the relationship with Bingham McHale allows his firm a chance to grow.

"By forming this alliance and taking on new clients, this is an opportunity for our firm," Coleman said. "As our clientele and workload increases, opportunities to bring on more staff will increase as well."

With offices in Indianapolis, Hamilton County, Vincennes and Jasper, and about 150 attorneys on staff, Bingham McHale is the fourth- largest law firm in the state. Specializing in business law, the firm works for national and international clients.

Bingham McHale partner Roderick H. Morgan said the alliance with Coleman Stevenson is a "win-win" for both firms.

"It will provide them with the depths of experience we bring and the capacity to do more legal work," Morgan said. "Having them on board will allow us to bring a more diverse approach to how we solve problems."

While the two firms will work together to seek out and represent new clients, both firms will remain independent.

"We are not trying to take over Coleman Stevenson," said Morgan, who also is chairman of the board of the Indianapolis Black Chamber of Commerce. "This is not a partnership. It's simply an alliance that will allow both firms the opportunity to work together to provided legal representation to large corporations."

Clients of Coleman Stevenson say the law firm's services were always first-class, but they have improved further since the alliance.
Ronnie Taylor, president and chief executive of Midwest Residential, a minority-owned and Indianapolis-based social services agency that provides in-home care to people with disabilities and seniors, praised the two firms' decision to work together.

"The alliance is great. We've had a couple of instances where we were able to work with both firms," Taylor said. "With Bingham McHale being the larger firm, they had a few connections that were helpful and some experience that was very beneficial."

Morgan said the law firms' alliance is the first of its kind in Indiana as far as he knows, but he noted that firms in other states already have similar relationships.

"There's an Atlanta firm partnered with a firm on the East Coast and a (Washington) D.C. firm partnered with one in Chicago," Morgan said. "Diversity is becoming an emphasis in all business, not just legal business."

For the 6th consecutive year, Greenberg Traurig has been selected as the best corporate law firm in Miami by directors serving on boards of publicly traded companies. The results were published in Corporate Board Member magazine's annual Legal Industry Research Study, sponsored by FTI Consulting.

Corporate Board Member/FTI Consulting's annual study identifies the top 20 national corporate law firms and the top five corporate law firms in 25 major metropolitan areas, based on ballots submitted by directors serving on boards of publicly traded companies listed with the NASDAQ Stock Market, New York Stock Exchange, or American Stock Exchange.

"This recognition is especially meaningful to us because it comes from clients and people directly affected by the constantly changing legal and regulatory environment," said Gary Epstein, chair of Greenberg Traurig's national corporate practice. "We work hard to establish and maintain continued confidence and respect of corporate directors, and we are proud and grateful when our efforts are rewarded like this. I believe that we share this recognition with the other Greenberg Traurig corporate lawyers in South Florida, with whom we work on a regular basis, and, in a broader sense, with the entire national corporate practice group, whose resources are always available to us."

"Doing well in our survey has become a singular badge of honor, for the very reason that it doesn't come from the law firms' peers," said William S. Rukeyser, editorial director of Corporate Board Member. "It's an accolade from their customers -- the directors, executives and general counsel who hire them, pay their bills, and thrive or suffer from their advice."

The 40 attorneys in Greenberg Traurig's Corporate and Securities Practice in Miami represent both public and privately-held clients in a wide range of industries and in transactions ranging from multi-billion dollar acquisitions to private equity transactions as well as public and private offerings of securities.

About Greenberg Traurig, LLP

Greenberg Traurig, LLP is an international, full-service law firm with 1,700 attorneys and governmental affairs professionals in the U.S., Europe and Asia. The firm is ranked seventh on The American Lawyer's Am Law 100 listing of the largest law firms in the U.S., based on number of lawyers.

The sonar is used to detect underwater objects like submarines and is critical to readiness training, Navy officials said.

"The U.S. Navy's use of sonar, and the ability to test and train with it, is critical to the national security of the United States," the government argued before the start of the hearing in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

Three tests have taken place off the California coast and 11 more were scheduled through 2009.

But the NRDC claims the sonar, which shoots bursts of sound, is so loud it kills whales.

"Scientists all agree that mid-frequency sonar causes whales to strand and die," said Joel Reynolds, senior attorney at NRDC and director of its marine mammal protection program.

The NRDC filed a similar lawsuit in Hawaii, where a court ordered the Navy to implement measures to protect whales before proceeding with its exercises.

"This is among the most biologically rich areas in the country," Reynolds said about the area off the California coast. "It's an extraordinary place and it's the wrong place to be testing with sonar technology that's known to kill whales."

The NRDC said it expects the judge to issue a final decision later on Monday or Tuesday.

Navy officials said they will appeal.

A U.S. district court judge delivered a major setback to Alcatel-Lucent on Monday by setting aside a jury's $1.5 billion judgment against Microsoft in a patent infringement lawsuit over digital music technology.

Alcatel-Lucent's lawsuit against Microsoft had produced the largest patent judgment on record.

The case centered on origins of the MP3 standard.

The Windows Media Player software, part of Microsoft's basic operating system, plays audio files using the MP3 standard, the most common method of distributing music on the Internet.

The ruling could have an impact on Apple, the dominant maker of digital music hardware and software, as well as hundreds of other companies that use the standard.

Judge Rudi Brewster of U.S. District Court in San Diego wrote in a 43-page order that the jury's damage award in February could not stand because one of the two patents on which the case focuses was not infringed by Microsoft.

He also noted that ownership of the second disputed patent was questionable, and a retrial may be needed to resolve that matter.

Alcatel-Lucent immediately said it intended to appeal the ruling.

Earlier this year, Roe told lawyers at a Kansas City Metropolitan Bar Association conference that "there will be negative campaigns against judges in 2008. That is reality."

Lathrop simply said that it no longer needed the space it leased to Roe and that it had given its landlord and Roe notice of its intent to terminate the lease.

Roe last week said his lease runs until March or April and he'd been dealing directly with the building's owner, an out-of-town outfit. He said he originally signed a two-year lease.

Roe said he hopes to remain in the space by negotiating directly with the landlord but plans to remain there in any event until the sublease expires.

The space houses nine employees, according to Roe, who has his own 20- by 25-foot glassed-in corner office. He said he had two other offices in the area but declined to disclose their locations.

Blunt's sister, Amy Blunt, works in Lathrop's government relations department. Like other large and influential law firms, Lathrop boasts both heavyweight Democrats and Republicans on its roster, including Jack Craft (Republican) and Harold Fridkin (Democrat) in its Kansas City office.

KSU case is 'moot'

A constitutional challenge to the removal in 2004 of the adviser to Kansas State University's newspaper was ruled moot last week by a federal court.

Katie Lane, the former editor in chief of the Collegian, and Sarah Rice, its former managing editor, sued over the removal of Ron Johnson as the paper's adviser, supposedly because of the subpar quality of the newspaper's news coverage.

The move occurred after a controversy erupted on campus over the extent of minority news coverage in the newspaper and its failure to cover the Big XII Conference on Black Student Government held in Manhattan in 2004. Lane and Rice claimed that Johnson's removal was triggered by the controversy and chilled the exercise of their First Amendment rights.

The trial court dismissed the case, finding that the First Amendment claim failed because the decision to remove Johnson was based on the quality of the Collegian, not its content. On appeal, the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the trial court's decision, ruling that because Lane and Rice have since graduated, their claims were moot.

An exception to the mootness doctrine — where there's a reasonable expectation that the same complaining parties will be subjected to the same actions again — was found inapplicable.

"Because only KSU students serve as editors of the Collegian, there is no reasonable expectation that Lane and Rice will be subjected, post-graduation, to censorship by defendants in connection with this newspaper," the court stated.

The USA TODAY/Gallup poll, taken Friday through Sunday, found that Clinton has widened her lead over Obama. Her support was at 48 percent, up 8 percentage points from three weeks ago, while Obama's support was down two percentage points at 26 percent.

The 22-point gap between the two is nearly double the margin found in the July 12-15 poll.

Among Democrats and independents who "lean" Democratic, former North Carolina senator John Edwards is at 12 percent.

Among Republicans, the race is stable: former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani at 33 percent, former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson at 21 percent, Arizona Sen. John McCain at 16 percent and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney at 8 percent.

The Democratic race is much closer in the states where opening contests will be held and campaigning is already fierce, the USA Today newspaper reported.

In the survey, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents by overwhelming margins say Clinton would do a better job as president than Obama in handling terrorism, the Iraq war and relations with unfriendly nations.

If the nomination narrows down to two, Clinton was preferred over Obama by 59 percent to 36 percent.

Also in the poll, President George W. Bush's approval rating ticked up to 34 percent, better than his low of 29 percent in July. The approval rating for congressional Republicans was 29 percent and 37 percent for congressional Democrats -- both new lows in the eight years since the question was first asked.

The survey of 1,012 adults has an error margin of +/- 3 points for the full sample, and 5 points for the Republican and Democratic subsamples.