August 7, 2003
THE DAILY JOURNAL
LOS ANGELES – Veteran trial lawyer Brian Lysaght is leaving the Santa Monica-based litigation boutique he founded in 1985 to become head of Piper Rudnick’s West Coast litigation practice.
Today is his last day with O’Neill, Lysaght & Sun. Lysaght, 56, joins Piper Rudnick’s Century City office Monday.
O’Neill Lysaght, a 20-lawyer firm that handles complex business litigation, intends to change its name to O’Neill & Sun, according to a firm spokeswoman.
“I have received overtures over the years from a wide variety of firms,” Lysaght said. “This was a time in my life where I was receptive.”
Lysaght said that he was immediately enamoured by Piper Rudnick for a variety of reasons. For one, the 950-lawyer firm employs 35 lawyers in Los Angeles, 26 of whom are litigators. The smaller post will provide the flexibility to which Lysaght is accustomed in the boutique setting, while the size and breadth of the firm will give him access to its long list of institutional clients.
“It wasn’t an event that caused the change,” Lysaght said. “I’d been thinking that it’d be fun to try cases in New York or Boston for different kinds of clients. It was a change I wanted to make for no other reason than getting a different look at different kinds of trials.”
Lysaght said the loss of the high-profile Winnie-the-Pooh royalty case to Jones Day lawyers Elwood Lui and Rick McKnight had nothing to do with his decision.
Lysaght was on the short list of lawyers competing to represent the Slesinger family in the case. The Slesingers, who purchased the rights to Pooh in the 1930s, claim that the Walt Disney Corp., which licensed the Pooh franchise, owes them hundreds of millions of dollars.
Lysaght said that he didn’t lose the business because he was with a smaller firm.
“I think clients typically hire lawyers and not law firms,” he said.
He says that he wanted to try the case on a contingency basis and “it could have been that they wanted to do the case on an hourly basis.”
Nevertheless, the lure of Piper Rudnick’s national presence attracted Lysaght.
“This is an evolutionary step for him and [gives him] the ability to get the kind of cases where he wouldn’t have had the exposure before,” Piper Rudnick Los Angeles managing partner Jeffrey Rosenfeld said.
Rosenfeld opened the Los Angeles office of Piper Rudnick in January 2001. The firm has 200 lawyers in the nation’s capital and a substantial presence in Chicago, Baltimore, Boston and New York. Piper Rudnick has 14 offices spread throughout the nation.
Lysaght is the latest high-powered litigator to leave a smaller shop in search of a larger – typically national – platform from which to practice.
In January, Fenwick & West’s top litigator, Timothy Roake, left the firm to join Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Though not a litigation boutique, Fenwick & West has just one office outside California – in Boise, Idaho. In June, Fenwick & West also lost litigator Claude Stern to Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges. That litigation firm has a small New York office.
And larger law firms are in hot-pursuit of valuable litigators like Lysaght and his partners.
In May, Lysaght successfully represented Dickson, Carlson & Campillo in its lawsuit against former partner Debra Pole and Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. A Malibu jury found that Pole breached her fiduciary duty to former law firm Dickson Carlson by providing client information to Brobeck Phleger when she joined that firm. However, Dickson Carlson only received a tiny fraction of the $30 million it sought.
Some of the big wins in Lysaght’s career include a $42.6 million jury verdict for Lion Country Safari against The Irvine Co. for lost profits and punitive damages. He also secured a $11.2 million verdict against the State of California in a real estate dispute involving a property in West Lake Village.
In July, Liner Yankelevitz Sunshine & Regenstreif hired O’Neill Lysaght white-collar litigator Ellyn Garofalo. At the time, the rainmaker said she decided to join the larger firm because her practice was outgrowing her former firm.
White-collar litigators like Garofalo are in especially high demand, according to O’Melveny & Myers Los Angeles managing partner Seth Aronson.
“As corporate transgression has become increasingly criminal, a lot of corporate clients are looking for firms with white-collar expertise,” Aronson said.
The two remaining name partners, Brian O’Neill and Brian Sun, are both highly sought-after defenders in white-collar crime cases. Sun acknowledges that the firm’s lawyers are constantly courted by other firms.
“The firm is able to stay together,” Sun said. “We have the ability and the business to do it.”
Sun would not comment when asked if he was considering any offers. O’Neill was not available for comment. “Our view is twofold,” Sun said. “One is that we wish [Lysaght] the best of fortune in the future, and we have extremely high regard for him. The other is that our practice is strong, and we have our niche as a boutique litigation firm and expect that we will continue to thrive in the future.”