CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER
Youth,
Humor, Humility Give Chris Clark a Leg up at LeBoeuf
20 Corporate Crime Reporter 7(10), February 7, 2006
Energy and insurance law firm LeBoeuf Lamb is seeking to jump start a white
collar defense practice.
Last year, the 600-lawyer multinational giant snatched former Securities and
Exchange Commission (SEC) general counsel Ralph Ferrara from Debevoise &
Plimpton.
Also last year, they grabbed Mark Radke – former chief of staff to Harvey
Pitt when Pitt chaired the SEC – from Howrey.
In November 2005, Christopher Clark, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in Manhattan,
joined the firm.
Clark was one of the gang of Manhattan federal lawyers who prosecuted the Adelphia
fraud – Adelphia founder John Rigas got 15 years, his son Tim got 20 years
– while Adelphia itself got a non pros agreement in May 2005.
Now, Clark co-chairs LeBoeuf Lamb’s white collar defense practice with
Stephen Best, a former assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C.
Clark is relatively young – 34 years old – to be co-chairing a major
firm’s white collar practice.
But he says, there are benefits to youth.
“Lots of rules are relatively new – like Sarbanes Oxley,”
Clark said in an interview with Corporate Crime Reporter. “Lots
of big accounting fraud prosecutions didn’t happen ten years ago. The
other thing good about a younger person is that you are willing to learn new
concepts, new rules, new principles. One of the industries that is subject to
new securities regulations is the hedge fund industry. Not many people can claim
to be 50-year practitioners of hedge fund law, because it wasn’t around
50 years ago. A younger person can dedicate time to understanding that industry
very early in their career and build up some expertise on it.”
In addition to youth, Clark brings humor.
While he was at Columbia Law School, Clark edited the school’s humor magazine
– Satiric Method.
We asked Clark if he saw any humor in the corporate crime field.
“Certainly at times there is humor,” Clark said. “I don’t
have any great jokes about journal entries or depreciation of assets but certainly
you see e-mails that are quite funny and that I can’t share in a family
publication such as yours. But there is no question that there is humor in the
day to day interaction of people. When it comes down to people who are involved
in these investigations, it is usually not very funny. But sometimes, when you
are going against a big regulatory apparatus, even one that is very smart and
understanding, sometimes the only thing you can do is laugh at it because it
is so overwhelming for people.”
As a defense attorney, do you use humor as a coping mechanism?
“Sometimes we try to,” he said. “No one in government has
to listen to you. You can go in there and they can not take your presentation
seriously or not give you very much time. If you come at them with a humorous
and humble attitude sometimes, it makes it much more palatable for them. And
if they don’t listen to you, you have to joke about it, because otherwise,
you are going to cry.”
At Berkeley, Clark studied rhetoric.
His thesis: The Rhetoric of Baseball Stadium Architecture.
Let’s not go too deep into this, but what was that about?
“I wrote it around the time that Camden Yards and the new Comisky Park
had been built and many other new old style stadiums were being built,”
Clark said. “The central thesis was this was an attempt by America to
get back to the good feelings of a simpler time by creating stadiums that weren’t
organic outgrowths of the city, like Fenway Park and Tiger Stadium were –
where the irregular borders of the stadium were actually defined by the streets
and buildings. But the new old stadiums artificially set up that look in a situation
where it wasn’t organic at all – it was a statement about baseball
being a return to American values and a simpler time.”
Bringing down the hammer on major white collar crooks gives Clark some insight
into what prosecutors are looking for.
“The first step of every defense is trying to explain to the regulator
or prosecutor why your client’s point of view is a fair point of view,”
Clark said. “And having sat across the table (on the prosecutor’s
side), you have a different perspective on that interaction and the way that
interaction takes place, and what’s going through the minds of the guys
who are deciding whether they are going to pursue this enforcement action further
or not. It’s invaluable.”
(For a complete transcript of the interview, see “Interview with Christopher
Clark, Partner, LeBoeuf, Lamb, New York, New York,” 20 Corporate Crime
Reporter 7 (pages 10-16), February 13, 2006, print edition only.)
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