Hillary Clinton’s Forgotten Career: Corporate Lawyer

[Guest]

Good informative article!

 

 

 

ITTLE ROCK, Ark.—One of Hillary Clinton’s first assignments as a corporate lawyer landed her far from her roots. She helped overturn a ballot measure that increased electric rates for businesses and lowered them for the poor.

“Instead of defending poor people and righting wrongs, we found ourselves squarely on the side of corporate greed against the little people,” her colleague, Webb Hubbell, later wrote.

The future presidential contender worked for 15 years as a corporate litigator at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas’s capital, longer than any other position in or out of government. Her portrait still hangs in the firm’s downtown offices.

 

Yet that chapter in her life has been all but excised from the official Hillary Clinton story. She hardly ever mentions it on the campaign trail. Her husband skipped past it when telling of her life story at the Democratic National Convention. Until August, it wasn’t even mentioned on her campaign’s official biography.

It illustrates a pattern apparent through Mrs. Clinton’s career and into this year’s presidential campaign: She emphasizes different roles for different audiences. During her time in Arkansas, she was an advocate for children and families, and a successful lawyer at a white-shoe, mostly male law firm, representing the state’s biggest corporations.

This characteristic leads many supporters to predict she would build governing coalitions if she becomes president. Opponents, including some on the left of her own party, conclude it means she lacks core convictions.

 

The duality was on display in transcripts of paid speeches Mrs. Clinton gave to Wall Street firms before she entered the presidential race. As a candidate, she has emphasized the need for tough regulation of Wall Street. In those addresses, she pointed to the industry’s contributions.

 

“More thought has to be given to the process and transactions and regulations so that we don’t kill or maim what works,” she said in one speech underwritten by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., according to a transcript that was stolen from her campaign chairman’s email account.

Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon pointed to her advocacy work during her Rose years. “From the day she left law school, Hillary Clinton has never stopped being an advocate for children and families,” he said. “This period was among her most active years as Arkansas’ First Lady, when she introduced a new early childhood education program and expanded health access to rural parts of the state.”

 

Mrs. Clinton’s years at the firm included some controversy. For one, the roots of the Whitewater affair reach back to her years at Rose when her husband was serving as Arkansas governor. The firm and Mrs. Clinton represented a failed savings-and-loan association run by James McDougal, the Clintons’ partner in the Whitewater real-estate investment, in a matter before state regulators. Whitewater dogged the Clintons throughout Bill Clinton’s presidency, though neither of them was ever charged.

 

When her husband ran for president in 1992, her work at Rose sparked questions about whether she had benefited from state business handled by her firm. Mrs. Clinton denied that it had. “For goodness' sake, you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks,” she said at the time.

Two of her best friends at the firm followed the Clintons to Washington. One of them, Mr. Hubbell, eventually went to prison after it was discovered he had stolen from the firm. They haven’t spoken since. “She doesn’t talk to me,” Mr. Hubbell said in a recent interview. The other friend, partner Vincent Foster, committed suicide.

Mrs. Clinton, known then as Hillary Rodham, joined the Rose Law Firm in 1977. She had followed Mr. Clinton to Arkansas and was teaching at the University of Arkansas law school when he was elected attorney general and planned a move to Little Rock. She had worked with Mr. Foster on a project, and he helped recruit her to the firm, which was founded in 1820 and bills itself as the oldest law firm west of the Mississippi River.

At the law school, she had run a legal-aid clinic for the poor. Many of the Rose firm’s clients were big companies, including three of the state’s largest: Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Tyson Foods Inc. and Stephens, Inc., a brokerage firm.

 

In one way, the Rose years reinforce a theme of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign—that she is a pioneer for women. She was the firm’s first female associate, and two years later, its first female partner.

Although many partners welcomed her to the firm, some initially worried how they would introduce her to clients and what would happen if she became pregnant, Mr. Hubbell recalled.

When she did have a child, she has said, some partners were surprised that she expected to be paid during her maternity leave.

Some people who worked with her said her casual dress and look were out of step with Southern women of that era. “Her appearance was much more stodgy and old maid-ish,” said Joe Giroir, one of her partners from that era. “I don’t think she ever had a real feel of Arkansas.”

Mr. Giroir said there was just one woman in his law school class, and for years he had “misgivings about female attorneys because I felt like their family obligations were going to interfere” with their work. He said he changed his mind after seeing a female lawyer in Houston do a good job with a case.

Inside the firm, lawyers were split over Mrs. Clinton’s value as a partner, according to Mr. Hubbell and others.

 

Mrs. Clinton recruited Amy Lee Stewart to the firm and mentored her. “Whenever I needed anything, wanted to ask a question, needed help with the right angle on a brief, I’d say, ‘Do you have a few minutes?’ ” recalls Ms. Stewart. “She’d say, ‘Come in. Let’s have a cup of tea and cookies.’ ”

Other colleagues resented Mrs. Clinton’s outside interests and how they limited her billable hours. In addition to time away campaigning for her husband, who was on the ballot every two years, she served as chairwoman of both the Legal Services Corp. and the Children’s Defense Fund and led efforts to revamp Arkansas’s education system.

“You can say that, well, perhaps from one perspective she wasn’t as productive as other partners were,” says Jerry Jones, a Rose colleague. “But from another perspective, what a great role model. She is able to balance all of these things and be successful at them.”

 

As first lady in 1996, Mrs. Clinton gave a deposition as part of a Whitewater inquiry in which she talked about how her attentions were divided in the mid-1980s. “I was engaged in a lot of pro-bono public activities,” she said. “I spent much of 1982 campaigning nearly full-time for my husband. I spent much of 1983 heading up the Arkansas Education Standards Committee, so that my time was not solely devoted to law practice by any means.”

At Rose, her share of the profits was tied to the business she generated, so her time on outside civic and political activities meant she earned less than other partners. She supplemented her income by serving on corporate boards including Wal-Mart and TCBY Enterprises, the yogurt franchise, both Rose clients.

She wrote in her 2003 memoir, “Living History,” that she “worried that because politics is an inherently unstable profession, we needed to build up a nest egg.”

By 1991, she was earning just over $100,000 from the firm, plus another $60,700 from director’s fees, according to news reports at the time. As governor, Mr. Clinton earned $35,000 that year.

In her 2003 book, Mrs. Clinton writes only briefly about her work at Rose. She highlights a couple of cases, including her first jury trial, where she defended a canning company sued by a man who found the rear end of a rat in his pork and beans. He claimed he couldn’t kiss his fiancée because every time he thought about the situation he would spit. Mrs. Clinton argued the man hadn’t suffered any real damages and because the rodent part had been sterilized it would be considered edible in parts of the world. She said the plaintiff won “only nominal damages.” Mrs. Clinton didn’t identify the name of the man or the company involved.

After that, she rarely appeared in trial. She took on some family-law cases, such as a father fighting for custody of his 6-year-old daughter, and a family that wanted to adopt their foster child, which ran counter to the rules then in place.

The bulk of her cases involved defending large corporations, a Wall Street Journal review of court records suggests. She represented a supplier of Jenn-Air products in a contract dispute between a distributor and supplier. She represented the cosmetics maker Maybelline Co. seeking to stop a competitor from advertising its mascara as “clean lash” because, Maybelline contended, it wasn’t actually waterproof.

She defended a company accused of wrongfully terminating an agreement to distribute natural-food products. She represented First Nationwide Bank when it argued that Nationwide Savings and Loan was violating its trademark by using the term “Nationwide Savings.” And when a former employee of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Arkansas argued he had been wrongly denied disability benefits, she represented the company.

Another partner, Herbert Rule, remembers a case in which a wealthy timber owner left the bulk of his $17 million estate to Arkansas College. When the man died at age 94, his recently hired female caregiver produced another will that left most of the money to her. The firm sued on behalf of the college.

“At a meeting with the lawyers representing the caregiver, Hillary spoke up after 30 minutes in a loud voice, pointing to the caregiver and said, ‘Everyone knows you told him what to do, and he did it. You told him to change his will, and he did,’ ” Mr. Rule recalled. A long silence and “some muttering” by the caregiver followed, he said. About two weeks later, the case settled, he said, with the bulk of the money going to the college.

 

“This was a remarkable example of Hillary’s strategic insight and chutzpah, two of her remarkable traits,” he said.

The electricity-rate case was already under way when she joined the firm in 1977. In November 1976, the activist group Acorn, which is now largely defunct, had succeeded in getting onto the ballot an initiative, dubbed LifeLine, to lower electricity rates for low-income users and increase them for businesses. It passed.

The Rose team’s argument was that it amounted to an unconstitutional taking, a line of reasoning Mr. Hubbell credits in part to Mrs. Clinton.

“We hated seeing her on the other side of the table,” says Wade Rathke, founder of Acorn, who was friends with her husband at the time. “We had never been confronted with the reality of her as a corporate lawyer. But there she was and there we were. We didn’t win this one.”

 

[Stormy]

 

This characteristic leads many supporters to predict she would build governing coalitions if she becomes president. Opponents, including some on the left of her own party, conclude it means she lacks core convictions.

 

The duality was on display in transcripts of paid speeches Mrs. Clinton gave to Wall Street firms before she entered the presidential race. As a candidate, she has emphasized the need for tough regulation of Wall Street. In those addresses, she pointed to the industry’s contributions.

[Koach]

we could post her shortcomings from now till doomsday (maybe not that far away if she is elected) and we'd never run out of things to post.