March 19, 2007
THE DAILY JOURNAL
By William-Arthur Haynes
Peter I. Ostroff, head of Sidley Austin’s West Coast litigation practice, met Samuel R. Miller in 1981 as co-counsel on a trade-secret case, “and I’ve been after him ever since,” he said. “I’m just a little slow off the dime, that’s all.”
For his part, Miller, a commercial litigator for 32 years, said he fields calls routinely from legal recruiters and turns them down just as frequently. In this instance, though, when informed Ostroff was heading the search, he finally entertained the idea of leaving Folger Levin & Kahn, a 75-attorney San Francisco-born firm where he has practiced for the past 12 years.
“We worked together for over a year, and I guess he remembered me fondly,” Miller said Friday on the eve of joining Sidley Austin’s San Francisco office.
“I’ve had recent experiences with Sidley, and I was very impressed with the caliber of people and the quality of practice,” added Miller, who interviewed with more than 50 Sidley Austin partners nationwide as part of the courtship. “I felt like, even though it was very hard to leave Folger, it’s a whole different platform.”
Miller, 58, and a resident of Piedmont, officially joins Sidley Austin’s San Francisco office today.
“He has a very rich background in commercial litigation, antitrust litigation, securities and white-collar,” Ostroff said of Miller. “He brings a lot of things to us, as well as being a very highly respected, well-known person in the San Francisco legal community.”
Ostroff said the 54-attorney San Francisco office, of which half are litigators, is looking to grow. To that end, the shop would be the beneficiary of Miller’s reputation, he added.
Litigation is Sidley Austin’s forte. In Los Angeles, nearly 70 percent of the firm’s lawyers fall under the litigation practice. Firmwide, litigators account for two-thirds of the roster.
“It’s likely that San Francisco will, over time, move more closely to match what we have firmwide,” Ostroff said. “We have been working on expanding the office, and we think Sam’s presence will give us a real boost in being able to attract other people and raising our profile in the San Francisco market because he is such a well-known figure in the San Francisco legal community.”
That’s ultimately what persuaded Miller to make the move, engineered by Southern California-based placement outfit Watanabe Nason Schwartz & Lippman.
“What enticed me was the opportunity both to really be, hopefully, helpful in significantly expanding the litigation and practice, including antitrust and securities, for Sidley here, and working in a firm that not only has a national but international platform in terms of antitrust,” Miller said.
Miller will look to expand his antitrust practice to a worldwide scale. Sidley Austin maintains 15 offices in North America, Europe and Asia.
Miller, a 1975 graduate of Boalt Hall, began his career at Morrison & Foerster, where he worked for 17 years until 1993, when Anne K. Bingaman, head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, recruited him to head the first antitrust case brought against Microsoft Corp. The software giant was accused of using exclusionary and anti-competitive contracts to maintain an unlawful monopoly of operating systems for personal computers.
After a year at the Justice Department, Miller joined Folger Levin.
“I decided that I wanted to be in a firm where I could sit around the table and see all my partners in one place,” he said.
Joining the 1,700-attorney Sidley Austin is a significant change from Folger, “but I guess it’s going back to where I started,” Miller added, referring to the big-firm platform. “Folger is a great firm, and it has done extraordinarily well in both attracting and keeping terrific people and also in doing work for Fortune 100 companies as a relatively small firm.”
Gregory D. Call, chair of Folger Levin’s litigation practice, wished Miller luck and said Folger Levin is content at the moment.
“We continue to have a thriving litigation practice,” Call said. “There’s a whole lot of stuff we have going on – we’re very busy.”
Call said Folger Levin, which maintains a 15-attorney Los Angeles outpost, has one of the top litigation practices in San Francisco. The firm maintains a strong relationship with Yahoo! Inc. and handles national litigation for Enterprise Rent-a-Car.
The bulk of Folger Levin’s litigation practice, which accounts for 70 percent of the firm’s 60-attorney San Francisco shop, involves plaintiffs’ counsel in commercial litigation. The firm recently finished representing Cisco Systems Inc. in its iPhone trademark-infringement suit against Apple Inc. and represented PeopleSoft Inc. against business-applications rival Oracle Corp.
“We continue to get that kind of work, and we expect to continue to get that kind of work,” Call said. “A lot of exciting things are going on here.”
Sidley Austin broke into San Francisco by way of a May 2001 merger with New York-based capital-markets outfit Brown & Wood. The marriage functioned as Sidley Austin Brown & Wood until Jan. 1, 2006, when the Brown & Wood legacy was erased from the letterhead.