On Oct. 20, leaders of Weil, Gotshal & Manges announced they would begin tying compensation to mentoring by considering, when divvying up end-of-the-year profits, whether a partner properly nurtured associates.

"It will clearly be taken into account at compensation time," said Stephen Dannhauser, managing partner of the $400-an-hour firm.

The next day, the partners of another major law firm, Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, announced a similar kiss-up to associates. Theirs came with an added twist: The associates will be asked to fill out a questionnaire that will rate their supervising partner. Anonymously, of course.

It is highly unlikely any partner will actually lose a cent from the firms' draw. This is, after all, more about message than money. But the move to hit partners where it hurts most shows how desperate firms are to keep their young workhorses on board.

"What we're trying to do is create a more collegial environment," said Barry Wolf, a member of Weil Gotshal's associate retention task force. "The partners all understand how important this is. It's hoped that the partners all understand how important this is."

Partners pull in the law firm's clients, but it's associates who grind out document drafts and stand waiting by the fax machine until all hours of the night. For generations, associates have subjected themselves to this woeful white-collar hazing for the prize of one day becoming a partner or landing a good job with a client.

With salaries for associates at the big firms starting at $100,000, that might not seem like such a bum deal. But many walk away with painful memories of canceled vacations and partner tantrums.

And walk away they do. A National Association for Law Placement study found that 56 percent of associates nationwide leave their firm by the end of their fourth year. An upcoming City Bar Association survey is expected to show figures even higher.

"Speak to a chairman of a law firm right now and the primary concern is not getting new business, is not even paying high salaries to the associates. It's recruiting and retaining people. It's looking for ways to increase our retention," said Mel Immergut, the chairman of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy.

Every junior lawyer out the door not only carries psychic costs–starting fresh with new employees is a headache for any employer–but there are also real costs. The tab for recruiting, hiring and training new lawyers can run as much as $80,000 per position.

Then there's the cost to a firm's reputation–there's not a young lawyer out there who doesn't know which ones nurture and which ones eat their young. Too much turnover just makes it harder to find replacements.

"The life of the partners right now is less posh, they feel the crunch because they can't find enough associates to work on their deals. So firms are throwing out different solutions to hold onto them," legal recruiter Steve Pittleman noted.

There's nothing magnanimous about it. "Other people are eating your seed corn," said recruiter Jonathan Lindsey. "These associates are the people who are going to grow up to pay you your pension. They're going to keep the firm going, they're the type of quality that you need to keep attracting clients."

Until Weil Gotshal came along, most firms focused their retention efforts on perks–offering associates sabbaticals for the first time, eliminating their billable hour requirements, even giving them gifts such as George Foreman grills. That's on top of pay raises up to 10 percent, and extra bonuses.

Firms like Milbank also have been pushing in another direction, trying for the big "we're-all-in-this-together" message with weeklong retreats for each new class of associates these past three years.

Yet, as one study has shown, one factor is significantly more likely to persuade a young associate to stick around: having a mentor.

Rosenman & Colin, one-third the size of Weil Gotshal, very quietly back in February began enforcing the mentoring goal: hitting its partners in the pocketbook. That Weil Gotshal and Brobeck are moving in the same direction shows that firms are serious about this retention thing, after all.

Nurture, or Else

Weil Gotshal has 750 attorneys, including 204 partners. With key clients that include General Motors Corporation, General Electric Capital Corporation and the National Basketball Players Association, it is a venerable corporate firm with considerable clout in New York's law community.

Brobeck, with 600 lawyers including 167 partners, is known for its technological clients including Cisco Systems Inc. and E-Trade and it handled the initial public offerings for Doubleclick and Geocities, cementing its place as a key firm for both Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley business.

Weil, Gotshal's five-partner retention task force pondered attrition for a year before concluding that it all comes down to personal relationships. Thus the emphasis on each partner being personally responsible for the well-being of his or her associates.

The firm will designate at least one partner in each department a "career development partner," to guide associates, and hire a full-time staff member to monitor partners' relations with associates. That person, the director of associate relations, "will have the authority to fix things," Mr. Wolf said. "This is going to be a senior administrative position in the firm, reporting directly to the executive partner."

In addition, Weil Gotshal will pay associates a new, accruing longevity bonus that will give a first-year–at the current pay scale–an extra $12,960 for sticking around until the end of their third year and $64,080 until their sixth. It will also pay associates all their guaranteed compensation as regular salary together, and stop deferring some of it as a "bonus." To help associates leave the office earlier in the day, Weil Gotshal will give junior associates a $2,000 technology stipend so they can buy home faxes and other gadgetry. Also, associates can use the gym membership subsidy at the health club of their choice.

"Obviously, the financial parts are tangible, they know what the check is," said Mr. Wolf. "The other parts of the program, which is changing behavior, they are excited about the prospect of it changing, but they're waiting to see signs of a change. It obviously will take some time."

Mr. Wolf said he expects none of his $865,000-a-year partners to botch the mentoring bad enough to be penalized. Nonetheless, Joshua Rubenstein, chair of Rosenman & Colin, said he, too, was hoping there would be no one docked when partner draws are set next February. But he said he has had to warn one repeatedly rude colleague: "If I hear about this happening one more time, you're going down 25,000."

Matching Reds and Golds

Brobeck is taking this mentoring thing a step farther. From now on, associates will fill out questionnaires rating a partner's behavior. The firm leaders will read the anonymous evaluations when they set each partner's percentage of the profits, which last year amounted to an average $545,000, according to The American Lawyer .

The questionnaire judges partners on a variety of key skills: delegating; designing the scope of assignments; weighing an associate's schedule; keeping a project running smoothly; answering questions; fairly choosing which associates to work with and giving effective career guidance. The firm gives a best-mentoring prize so the survey is seen as a "positive tool" for partners, said managing partner James Burns. But, he said, the bottom-line message is that "poor mentoring could retard your progress as a partner."

To be sure, not all firms will follow the path of "partner accountability." To some the policy seems a little too corporate nouveau . "Many of us have fairly stable compensation systems, lockstep or modified lockstep, and it's almost irrelevant in that context. Compensation is based solely on the number of years at the firm," said Peter v.Z. Cobb, head of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson.

But no New York firm leader dares appear complacent these days. Mr. Cobb, for instance, recently took a step in Brobeck's direction. He has asked his partners to volunteer to submit to review by their associates. So far, a quarter have gone for it.

Milbank, Tweed plans to continue its annual retreat to integrate new associates into the firm's culture. On Sept. 26, Mr. Immergut bused his 57 brand-new, not-yet-certified attorneys up the Hudson River to a "boot camp" at the $305-a-night Tarrytown House. The firm gave them six days of corporate law brushup classes as well as run of the property, including a Jacuzzi, all-you-can-eat snack bars, in-room Nintendo machines, a bowling lane and a majestic view of the Hudson Valley beside a stately Georgian mansion.

The primary focus was business. Standing in the sunshine after a sluggish afternoon session titled "The Big Acquisition," John O'Connor, a partner in Milbank's global corporate finance department–the only partner in the firm with a ponytail and goatee–stubbed out his Winston Light. "This week, they're starting to understand they wasted three years and $40,000," said Mr. O'Connor, who ran the program.

But the associates' favorite session was the one about the soft stuff, relationships. During a public speaking workshop, outside consultants labeled each associate's communications style with a color, and told them ways to collaborate when a partner's color doesn't match. "I was a red. Almost all of us were red," said new associate Morgen Bowers, a 31-year-old former business manager, actress and bartender at Blondie's Pub on the West Side. "Reds are bottom-line: Give me the bottom line, I don't want to hear all the mushy stuff–whereas golds are great listeners and they're very empathetic."

Mr. Immergut may be a gold. He didn't mind that the associates ended up doing their assigned homework together at tables in the Sleepy Hollow Pub, between rounds of Foosball and pool. "We wanted it to be a pure bonding experience," he said.

Indeed, the training session, which probably cost the firm around $75,000, had the desired effect on Ms. Bowers: "I like knowing that somebody's making a commitment to my education and bringing me up as a lawyer, and not just using me to fill out blanks on documents for four years until they decide whether I'm even partner material. That's what this program says to me.

"If I have a problem down the road, I might be more inclined to try and work it out rather than just leave, because they showed that commitment," she added.

The feeling might not last. In The American Lawyer 's national associate poll last summer, Milbank had lackluster scores in training and guidance, and one wrote, "The Milbank partners view associates as wage laborers, not colleagues." Some of the associates surveyed had been to Tarrytown in previous years.

Laurie Becker, a veteran legal recruiter, said there's only one retention policy that's sure to work: "When law firms have nice people in them, the associates tend to stay in them," she said.

The Law Journal went ahead and printed Justice Karla Moskowitz's ruling, anyway. The sober broadsheet further flouted Justice Moskowitz's wishes by also runningonSept.15afront-page news story, above the fold, about her written opinion and the piss-and-vinegar fight among lawyers that prompted it. The editors helpfully included the case's index numbers.

The episode is a rare departure for the controversy-shy trade newspaper-and injects a rare chill into its traditionally cozy relationship with judges, who are each week fawningly profiled in its pages.

Every day, the Law Journal selects one judge's ruling as the "Decision of the Day" and tags the handiwork of a few others as a "Decision of Interest." Naturally, judges like to messenger copies of their latest efforts to the editors for their consideration.

Justice Moskowitz went in the other direction after ruling in the case of Togut v. Thurm & Heller, a money dispute between two attorneys and the firm they left. As usual, she sent her decision to the back-office clerks at 60 Centre Street so it could be entered into the public record. But she also tacked to the top an unprecedented directive clearly intended for the Law Journal : "Not for publication because the privacy interests of the litigants outweighs public interest."

Judges just don't ask newspapers to suppress rulings on the public record. "I've never heard of anybody doing that," said the administrative judge of the Supreme Court's civil division in Manhattan, Stephen Crane. Not having been told the name of the judge, he added, "I can't conceive of what would impel a judge to ask that a decision not be published. You can seal it if there's a problem."

"We've never seen this before," said a concerned member of the Law Journal 's staff. For good reason, said one of Justice Moskowitz's fellow judges. "You don't write a note to the media saying, 'Don't publicize.' That's the surest way to publicize a case," scoffed the judge.

Justice Moskowitz declined comment about why she just didn't go ahead and seal the case. That would have merely required a brief memorandum. Or she could have ordered the court file "impounded" and stuffed in a safe or written the opinion using only the parties' initials.

David Bookstaver, a spokesman for the state's Office of Court Administration, said that Justice Moskowitz wasn't claiming any special right for this decision that newspaper editors were obliged to respect. "It was an informal request, for them to consider. She did it because she thought the privacy interests outweighed the public interest, and made a respectful request that they not further publicize it," he said.

Commonly, judges seal the case only after the parties ask. (They once did so with notorious frequency.) In this case, the litigants made no request, and the judge acted on her own authority. "Karla has a healthy distrust of the media," said another Centre Street judge.

Justice Moskowitz has been on the bench since 1982 and is married to a practicing lawyer, Marvin Moskowitz. The case she wanted buried sprung from the 1994 collapse of Bower & Gardner, once one of the city's 30 largest law firms. The firm died carrying a $5.3 million debt. Two attorneys, Jeffrey Wolk and Kevin Porter, refused to honor their designated part of the debt, claiming poverty. (They justified nonpayment, claiming they had been cut out of the talks when the debt load was divvied up.) Despite the attorneys' claims of indigency, the firm's bankruptcy trustee, lawyer Albert Togut, garnished their share of the profits at their current firm, Thurm & Heller. Mr. Wolk and Mr. Porter claimed that Mr. Togut purposely tried to embarrass them in front of their partners.

Charles Wertman, attorney for the two lawyers, contended that Justice Moskowitz was concerned that the lawyers' professional reputation could be unfairly damaged if the decision was published in a paper read by every lawyer in town-that the unfavorable ruling would make his clients look like skunks for not coughing up the $75,000 they each owed.

That's the impression given by the Law Journal , though its colorless news story refrained from splashing the attorneys' misdeeds front and center. The headline, "Partnership Draws Are Subject to Garnishment," made it sound as if Justice Moskowitz had thrown a thunderbolt at the case law. Not so, said one expert on legal disputes, who requested anonymity because of closeness to the involved parties: "There's no question that you can garnish partnership shares. There's been a whole host of cases that make that clear." Editor in chief Ruth Hochberger declined to comment.

Why He Studied Law

U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff, who sits half a block away from his state court colleague Justice Moskowitz, seemingly is less concerned about the reputations of the lawyers involved in litigation before him. Or at least less concerned about the reputation of one whose case he ruled on recently, a Park Avenue business lawyer named Bruce Schaeffer.

According to an opinion by Judge Rakoff published in July, Mr. Schaeffer is one of those people who flies off the handle as soon as he doesn't get his way, complaining and insisting he knows what he's talking about and repeatedly invoking his rights-in short, acting like a lawyer.

Mr. Schaeffer, in turn, claimed that Judge Rakoff has arrogantly decided to slap him around.

After boarding Trans-State Airlines Flight 7669, New York to Richmond, in April 1998, Mr. Schaeffer was told he couldn't bring on board two pieces of luggage. Judge Rakoff's account of what happened next: "He vigorously protested, asserting his alleged knowledge of airline regulations and procedures. When, having reluctantly relinquished one of the bags, he failed to receive a promised baggage receipt, he so vociferously pursued his demand for the receipt that he was finally asked to leave the flight." He refused, the police were called, and he was escorted from the plane. In Judge Rakoff's words, "He then returned home and immediately set about drafting the original complaint in this case, alleging breach of contract, battery, false imprisonment, defamation and tortious interference with prospective economic advantage, and demanding punitive and other damages in excess of $25 million."

Mr. Schaeffer's view of it is that the airline repeatedly lied to him and "said I was a danger to the safe operation of an aircraft, which is a Federal felony." He was so offended-he had missed the chance to give a seminar at a law school where potential clients were waiting-that he waited a year to take the case to trial in May. His lawyer described the airplane confrontation as "a classic New York moment," one man merely standing up for common sense. Nonetheless, Judge Rakoff dismissed several of his claims, and Mr. Schaeffer settled for the $396 refund he had received from the airline, as required by Federal aviation law.

"A legal education is a wonderful thing," wrote the judge, who graduated from Harvard Law School in 1969.

Mr. Schaeffer, who graduated from Brooklyn Law School, agreed that some people let their legal educations go to their head. "The judge has a streak of arrogance comparable to none and thinks it's just a big joke," he told The Observer .

Covington Keeps a Secret

For several weeks in July and August, Scott F. Smith, a high-flying mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, closed the door to his office on Avenue of the Americas, flipped open his Sprint PCS cell phone and double-clicked on his private e-mail account-which he eyeballed exclusively on his personal Dell Inspiron 3000 laptop. Mr. Smith, a rainmaker at the corporate law boutique of Howard, Smith & Levin, wasn't touching his office phone or his office computer because he was deep in merger negotiations with the leaders of the heavyweight Washington, D.C., firm Covington & Burling, and he wanted no one, but no one, to know.

Ever since London's Clifford Chance made its bid for global dominance in July by absorbing the old-line firm of Rogers & Wells, the law business' big players have darted like bats for the darkness.

But there's barely even shade to be found now. Rumors are rapidly proliferating, which is why Robert Profusek, a mergers-and-acquisition partner at Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue, a 1,100-lawyer firm, was impressed by Mr. Smith's stealth in cutting a deal on Sept. 21 with the Covington team. "They did a very good job in keeping that quiet. We've got our ear pretty close to the ground on all this stuff, and while we knew they were thumping around here, that didn't leak out until right at the end," said Mr. Profusek.

How effective were Mr. Smith's cell phone maneuvers? News of the Covington-Howard Smith merger didn't surface publicly-on the Washington edition of Greedy-associates.com, a lawyers' gossip site-until two days after the deal was sealed, despite the fact that more than 300 lawyers and a few dozen staff members had known about the Covington talks for three weeks.

Covington partner Andrew Friedman confessed that Mr. Smith was far more on the ball than his band of savvy Beltway operators. "The New York lawyers were much more clandestine than we were," said Mr. Friedman. "I got the impression that people in New York are more attentive to the way that people try to be clandestine than we do in D.C."

Mr. Smith's clandestine tactics included some low-key dining. For the face-to-face part of the negotiation, 12 D.C. lawyers sat down with Mr. Smith and company at the modest La Pizza Fresca on East 20th Street on a Saturday night. The sacrifice wasn't that great. The restaurant did have tablecloths.

Cold Hit revolves around the murder of an art dealer, which sends Ms. Fairstein's alter ego, sex-crimes unit chief Alexandra Cooper, racing around town from the morgue to fine restaurants like Patroon and Rao's. Ms. Fairstein's third book in three years, it was chosen by President Bill Clinton for his vacation reading list, and now, only a month after arriving in stores, has 85,000 copies in print.

"What I bring to the genre is authenticity," said Ms. Fairstein. "Raw, real and mean," explained the paperback cover of her first mystery, 1996's Final Jeopardy . "An authoritative and scary view from one who has battled evil and locked it away," is how the publisher pegged 1997's Likely to Die , her second effort.

It didn't require much snooping at the Four Seasons to discover where Ms. Fairstein gets the names and profiles of her characters–her Rolodex.

"I'm in the book," volunteered Kim McFadden, who first shows up on page 104. "I'm the benevolent federal prosecutor. Who ever heard of a benevolent federal prosecutor?" asked Ms. McFadden, who once worked in the Southern District in Manhattan and now works in New Jersey.

Her husband, a former prosecutor in the District Attorney's office in Manhattan (he asked that their family name not be used), made a cameo in Ms. Fairstein's Likely to Die . Another former assistant district attorney, Ed Broderick, managed to make it into each of the last two books.

Ms. Fairstein's most significant borrowing is herself. The Alexandra Cooper character–named after an art-lover friend, Alexander Cooper, and the wife of game-show host Ben Stein, Alexandra Denman–holds the same job and eats in the same places as Ms. Fairstein. She just happens to be, in Ms. Fairstein's words, "younger and blonder than I am." In the first book, Ms. Cooper has to solve the murder of a beautiful actress shot in the head on Martha's Vineyard. In the second, she unpuzzles the fatal stabbing of a top neurosurgeon. (In the third, she romances a New York Times reporter–exactly what her boss, Robert Morgenthau, did in real life.) Ms. Fairstein was given a $500,000 advance for her first two books. She declined to share what her advance for Cold Hit was.

The prosecutor's efforts at verisimilitude have duped some acquaintances who should know better. "Because I write the books in the first person and not the third, people do think, because of the I-I-I, that it's me. My friends call me up. Actually, family, too," conceded Ms. Fairstein, mentioning that the fiancé of her alter ego gets killed in an earlier book. "An old classmate came up to me and said, 'We went to law school together, and I didn't know that you lost your boyfriend then.'"

"These things aren't real, and the people aren't real," Ms. Fairstein insisted.

But some come close. Ms. Fairstein cast longtime New York Post reporter Mike Pearl as Mickey Diamond, and had him answer the phone the way that Mr. Pearl always wished he could, but never did: "Criminal court press room–where every story's a crime and every crime's a story." Margaret Feerick, a social worker and daughter of Fordham law school dean John Feerick, appears as a social worker. (Mr. Feerick bid $1,000 at a benefit auction to have a Fairstein character named for his daughter.) The fictional prosecutor Warren Murtaugh closely resembles Warren Murray, head of the Manhattan District Attorney's Trial Bureau 60 for the last 19 years. Like an old-school prosecutor, Mr. Murray wasn't talking.

"A lot of friends sort of want to be in it and ask to be in it. Some are just a natural part of my life, so a lot of friends are reflected that way," said Ms. Fairstein. For instance, the hosts of the Four Seasons party, Kelso & Company lawyer and banker Michael Goldberg and his wife Susan, were in the book, with different names.

The party was past bedtime for some whose names Ms. Fairstein used in the book. Vernon and Ann Jordan's grandson, Mercer, lends his name to Ms. Fairstein's chief detective. The name of a prosecutor actually belongs to a 6-year-old boy, son of Ms. McFadden. Explained his father: "He's just learning to read. We discussed it at breakfast. We told him that Mommy and Daddy have a friend who wrote a book. 'There's a character named in it after you.' We took him upstairs to show him. He immediately recognized his name, but he's still trying to figure out how he got into a thick book."

Chuck Ruff Arrives

Covington & Burling, the law firm that just welcomed back White House counsel Charles F.C. Ruff, has always been a Washington, D.C., outfit, without a single New York partner. For the longest time, the firm hadn't thought that a problem. Since 1919, its rock-ribbed but mostly anonymous power lawyers have–with the utmost discretion, and for astronomical fees–whispered to government bureaucrats, dropped notes to Congressmen, drafted proposed international treaties to help clients like General Motors, AT&T and DuPont obtain the desired governmental approvals. Joseph Goulden opened his landmark 1972 book of legal journalism, The Superlawyers, with a chapter on Covington & Burling. It was titled "The Pinnacle of Power."

But possessing even the greatest Washington influence doesn't seem to cut it any more in the cranked-up, continent-hopping law trade. So on Sept. 21, Mr. Ruff and his 339 colleagues decided to take over Howard, Smith & Levin, a 60-lawyer Avenue of the Americas firm widely honored, as one recruiter put it, for having "the highest-quality lawyers." It also boasts leading corporate clients and a median partner take of $650,000 or so. This latest merger is set to begin on Oct. 1.

The strategy behind the haute -pedigree union is simple: Washington insiders get some New York finance guys as partners, the finance guys get insiders, and Philip Howard gets to go to Washington.

Mr. Howard, who started the firm in 1983, once ran unsuccessfully for a City Council seat from Gramercy Park and is currently the chairman of the Municipal Art Society. He is also a civic-minded author. A few years back, he wrote a decent-selling book (more C-SPAN than Linda Fairstein) called The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America that argued for the simplification of Federal laws. No lawyer was willing to criticize him publicly, but his attack on obfuscation, were it to come to fruition, is clearly hostile to lawyers' fondness for paying work. Mr. Howard has been named vice chairman of Covington.

"This makes all the sense in the world for Philip in terms of his political ambitions. It's certainly a fact of life that Philip's interested in political things, and of course Covington's extremely well connected," said Mr. Howard's fellow founding partner, Lawrence Darby, who left the firm last year. Mr. Ho-ward insisted that he's done with electoral politics and instead will concentrate on his work as a citizen-lawyer. "I'm very interested in being a leader and in reforming government positions that are anti-human and tend to drag down our democracy," he said.

Covington's brain trust seems most excited about the arrival of the entrepreneurial rain-making of Scott F. Smith and Stephen Infante, who work with software and technology companies. "I am very hopeful we'll follow their lead; I think they have a vigor and dynamism that will be good for us," Covington partner Andrew Friedman said, referring to the New York partners in general.

This is merely what Mother would call a nice merger, not a blockbuster. Covington now has 400 lawyers and a couple of smallish offices in London and Brussels–really, what do 400 lawyers get you, when the trans-Atlantic Clifford Chance behemoth is nearly seven times the size, and many other American firms are double it? "It wouldn't surprise me if they were to merge later with another firm. It does seem to me to be a stepping stone to something larger," said John Suydam, managing partner of one of Howard, Smith & Levin's competing mighty-mite firms, O'Sullivan, Graev & Karabell.

Mr. Friedman replied that large mergers were not in the plan. "We want to be a leading firm in strategic places, not all around the globe, just in the important places. Obviously, we think of New York that way." About time.

You can reach N.Y. Law by confidential e-mail at mfleischer@observer.com

The witness' account is likely to interest the 23 grand jurors who have been meeting in a courtroom at 360 Adams Street since Sept. 7. The jurors will probably be on the case at least until October, said a source in the office of Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes, who convened the jury.

The witness' allegations raise questions about how police conducted themselves in the crucial hours after the shooting-and how they gathered the facts that led them, as well as Police Commissioner Howard Safir and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, to loudly proclaim that the shooting was justified.

The two officials asserted that Busch put an officer in mortal danger by swinging a hammer while shrieking outside his Borough Park home, forcing officers to fire at him. Busch was hit 12 times, in his heart, lungs, liver and intestines. "A hammer is a deadly weapon. Would you like to have a hammer inserted in your brain?" Mr. Giuliani asked reporters at a press conference.

However, Mr. Safir's and Mr. Giuliani's version of events-which has offended many in Mr. Giuliani's traditional Orthodox Jewish constituency-rests, in part, on the testimony of an officer whose actions after the shooting have been put into question. That officer, Daniel Gravitch, who did not fire his weapon during the confrontation with Busch, was one of two officers to recount the events for authorities. The others, the shooters, have not yet given statements to either the police or the District Attorney.

The grand jurors must confront conflicting accounts about the final minutes of Busch's life. Their main task is to assess the more than 20 statements-some contradictory-from eyewitnesses about what led up to the shooting. Then they have to determine whether the officers reacted inexcusably and, if so, whether their actions were criminal.

On the key question of mortal danger, a source in the District Attorney's office told The Observer that a majority of the eyewitness statements contend that Busch indeed was moving toward the officers when they opened fire.

Yet several witnesses have said that was not the case, that Busch was standing still when shot. These witnesses said they have given their statements to the District Attorney.

One is Tzvi Rokeach, an attorney who asked that the name of his well-known midtown firm, which has strong Republican Party connections, not be named. Mr. Rokeach was standing directly across the street from the shooting, helping his parents move. He agreed with the apparently minority point of view that Busch was stationary, about six to eight feet away, when he was shot. "What concerns me is that within 24 hours after this happened, the organs of the Police Department were working in full defense to say [Busch] was beating someone up. They said that he was standing over the police officers, ready to bash in someone's brains with a hammer. And that's incorrect," said Mr. Rokeach. (Authorities, in fact, said merely that the police officers were in mortal danger, and Busch had the hammer raised and was capable of harming one or more police officers.)

Things are moving on other legal fronts as well: The Busch family is in discussions with lawyers regarding a possible wrongful death suit; they are already working with the New York Civil Liberties Union to push for reforms in police training.

Stuart London, the attorney coordinating the four patrol officers' defense, said that he expected the officers to testify before the grand jury. George Cerrone, the attorney for the two sergeants involved, said that he was leaning toward having the sergeants testify, but, at press time, he had not yet discussed testimony conditions with the District Attorney, and no final decision had been made.

So far, according to a source in the District Attorney's office, the grand jury has heard from some eyewitnesses but none of the officers. However, they haven't heard from all the eyewitnesses, including Raphael Eisenberg. On Aug. 30, Mr. Eisenberg, a resident of Borough Park, was walking home from work on 46th Street in Brooklyn when he saw two police officers confronting Gary, or Gideon, Busch. Busch was well known in the neighborhood because of his eccentric, occasionally disruptive behavior; he apparently had stopped taking his anti-psychotic medications.

Grand jurors will ask Mr. Eisenberg and other witnesses: Once Busch darted up the stairs leading out of Busch's basement apartment, were Busch and his hammer a menace to the officers? Mr. Cerrone, the lawyer, said that Busch hit Sgt. Terrence O'Brien three or four times, on the arm, leg, hip and gun holster, and that the sergeant was left with a big bruise on his arm. Standing next to Mr. Giuliani at a press conference, Mr. Safir said, "They were confronted with deadly force, and they did what their training told them: They responded with deadly force."

Busch's brother Glenn, a trusts-and-estates attorney with his own midtown office, told The Observer the shooting was an "execution."

Mr. Eisenberg and three other witnesses said that Busch had scampered away from the officers and had stopped moving, clearly smarting from pepper spray and shrieking in a berserk state. After a brief standoff with officers, Busch was shot 12 times as he stood in the driveway before collapsing. He was dead on arrival at Maimonides Medical Center. These witnesses were first interviewed by The Jewish Press and Newsday .

Mr. Eisenberg also told The Observer he informed District Attorney Hynes' investigators that immediately after the shooting he had spoken to a police officer, who had not been involved in the shooting, who was canvassing for witnesses in its wake.(Contacted by The Observer , one source in the District Attorney's office was not aware that Mr. Eisenberg had made such a report to the District Attorney.) Mr. Eisenberg said that the officer, Daniel Gravitch, reached for a piece of paper to add Mr. Eisenberg's name to the witness list, telling him, "I didn't even fire my gun and I'm shaking." But then, according to Mr. Eisenberg, Officer Gravitch wrote down Mr. Eisenberg's name, then scratched it out after Mr. Eisenberg contended that Busch had not been moving when he was shot.

Another witness, a 16-year-old named Aaron Gerlitt, had told friends and neighbors that he had a similar experience with the police and had reported it to the District Attorney. (Mr. Gerlitt had traveled to Israel for the Jewish holidays and could not be contacted. His account comes from three different people to whom he told the story.)

Failure to turn in the name of a witness who could implicate another officer is considered a prosecutable abuse of authority, said attorneys and prosecutors not involved in the case. John Tynan, Mr. Gravitch's lawyer, did not return calls from The Observer by press time to say whether Mr. Gravitch ultimately included Mr. Eisenberg's name in the list given to his commanders. Mr. Gravitch did not respond to a message left at the Brooklyn South command to which he and the other five officers involved have been temporarily reassigned.

Glenn Busch said he had heard these stories but declined to comment on them, or on any contemplated civil suit. "We're exploring our options, as any family would do, and focusing in on this investigation, that this investigation is thorough and handled properly," he said. He said he believes that some witnesses have still not come forward. Mr. Rokeach, the midtown lawyer and a witness, also had that impression.

The Busch case will be politically charged on two fronts, no matter what the grand jury does. The tragedy occurred in a year in which both police misconduct and the dehospitalization of the mentally ill have drawn a massive amount of public attention.

Busch's brother said that the Police Department had played one issue against the other. "When I left the morgue, the wheels were already spinning, trying to develop as much as possible on the victim," he said. He asserted that there was no way newspapers could have published as much as they did about his brother's history without help from the Police Department.

Mr. Hynes, too, is interested in Busch's mental health history-especially in his previous hospitalizations. "He's fed up with people being released improperly," said someone in his office. The Busch family has asked for a meeting with the District Attorney's office, which was tentatively scheduled for sometime after Sept. 20.

Even if the officers are deemed to have fired for excusable reasons, and no criminal trial is held, it's clear that the Busch shooting will continue to have a political legacy. Glenn Busch confirmed that the family had retained Norman Siegel of the N.Y.C.L.U. to aid in getting the police to revise their policies.

The Busch family and Mr. Siegel have noteworthy allies. It's conceivable to think that the Orthodox Jewish community, even more than all those legal eagles-the Justice Department, the Public Advocate, the Attorney General and the Civilian Complaint Review Board-will be able to squeeze Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Safir politically for a further reform of police procedures. Four days after the shooting, Mr. Safir made his way to Borough Park for a meeting with a clutch of rabbis. Many of the rabbis had expressed support of the police the day after the shooting, but at that meeting on Sept. 3 they told Mr. Safir that they and their congregations were concerned about how the police handled the shooting. A leader of the Agudath Israel movement wrote to the Police Commissioner that, despite the usual faith in the police, there is "a widespread sense that something went terribly wrong."

On Aug. 31, Judge Chin gave Khallid Muhammad the right to have his Million Youth March in Harlem, overriding Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's objections that Mr. Muhammad had last year whipped the crowd toward rioting. Judge Chin, 45, the city's youngest Federal circuit judge and increasingly one of its most outspoken, made an obvious ruling, laying down the exact duration-and-space limits on the controversial rally that a higher court had imposed a year earlier–and that City Hall had initially offered to Mr. Muhammad this time around.

What got Judge Chin called names by the New York Post was his arguably gratuitous poke in the Mayor's eye in the last line of his 32-page decision. "Excessive numbers of police officers in riot gear, rigid enforcement of deadlines, and helicopters swooping over the crowd can only increase, rather than lessen, tensions," he chided. Earlier in the decision he had laid out other, similar "disquieting impressions" about the Police Department's conduct.

Judge Chin has slipped into the public eye only occasionally since he made it to the bench in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in 1994, including when he presided over cases involving Mariah Carey, corrupt police officers and Megan's Law. Later this fall, he may become more visible as he presides over Christian Curry's messy wrongful dismissal case against Morgan Stanley.

Yet down at the courthouse on Pearl Street, Judge Chin is known as the rare judge willing to put some oomph in his judging. More specifically, lawyers know him as a Jedidiah Purdy of the New York bar, decrying New York lawyers' uncivil straying from the straight and narrow. In past years, he has sanctioned lawyers for their frivolous lawsuits and blustery threats. In one case involving the estate of Andy Warhol, he hit up the lawyers of an Atlanta firm and their commercial client for $400,000. In May, the judge leaped on a soapbox when he blasted lawyer Judd Burstein, a member of the legal in-crowd. Tagging Mr. Burstein for unfair tactics, threatening his opponent and otherwise engaging in "vexatious and unreasonable conduct" that "can only be described as 'Rambo lawyering,'" he ordered the bold barrister to a special sanctions hearing.

In his opinion on Mr. Burstein's behavior, he quoted a law review article titled "The Topic Is Civility: You Got a Problem With That?": "Every time that you make uncivil lawyers lose, you score a big victory for civility. Every time an abrasive, abusive, hostile, harassing, combative, discourteous, hardball, win-at-all-costs, take-no-prisoners, scorched-earth, Rambo lawyer loses, it's a great day for civility."

The judge, citing a personal policy of not speaking to the press, declined to talk to The Observer .

No less than his sharp tongue, Judge Chin's path to the bench stands out. He was awarded a Federal judge's guaranteed lifetime salary at the tender age of 40. An employment litigator after his tenure in the U.S. Attorney's office (including under Mr. Giuliani), many doubted he was ready when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan nominated him, and some still aren't sure. "His reputation is he tries hard. He had a fairly limited background coming to the court; he had a niche practice before. He's been asked to decide cases that go way beyond his experience," said one Federal litigator.

By now, though, the guy has sat on 100 trials and had more than 500 published opinions, and his Million Youth March decision was instantly affirmed by the appellate court above him; the higher court even took Judge Chin's criticisms of the Police Department and added some bite to his gnaw.

Courthouse traditionalists, however, may be less fond of young Judge Chin's more independent qualities: Not only does he scold lawyers in that aggressive manner, he–yes–writes some of his decisions in the first person. Most other judges prefer to call themselves "the Court."

Yet it's his attachment to civility that is drawing attention down at the courthouse. In the case involving Mr. Burstein–which involved a fee dispute between Mr. Burstein's client, the creator of the hair Scunci, and her former attorney, Robert Cinque–Judge Chin issued warnings right from the opening bell. "There is too much emotion in this case," he said in the first hour. "Both sides should tone it down. When you're sitting there, don't make faces."

Later that day, he issued a second warning about sending facial signals. Two days after that, Judge Chin leaped on Mr. Burstein's partner, Laurie McPherson. "You're sitting there with your mouth wide open, and I find it extremely disrespectful and extremely distracting," he said.

"I apologize, Your Honor, I didn't realize I was doing it. I am somewhat surprised at your ruling, and that's the only reason I'm reacting," she replied.

"You can be surprised all you want. You know, I'm here to make rulings, right or wrong. If you don't agree with it, you can go up and appeal. And you don't make faces. You don't stand up and tell the court that you're surprised at the rulings. That's compounding the disrespectfulness."

Overnight, Mr. Burstein and Ms. McPherson wrote a letter of apology. Judge Chin didn't appreciate that, either. "I've got to say I don't believe the apology is really a sincere one," he said at the start of the next court day. "The implication is that, frankly, that I am being hypersensitive.… The fact is, there are very, very few judges who would tolerate a lawyer constantly making faces and then standing up and saying, 'I made a face because I was surprised by Your Honor's ruling,' as if to say, 'Your ruling was so stupid, I could not help myself to make a face.'"

"He has high standards, and he holds lawyers to them," said Hal Lieberman, a former chief prosecutor for disciplining lawyers.

"I know Denny is someone who feels strongly that if he sees something wrong happening, he's not going to look away," said Michael Patrick, his old law partner. "He's a no-nonsense guy who does not brook people attempting to do make-believe, either for their clients' sake or for their own egos." He's not afraid to say a witness has lied.

On Sept. 8, with the Million Youth March behind him, Judge Chin returned to the familiar territory of criticizing his former colleagues. During a panel discussion called "The Ethics Challenge" at the New York Country Lawyers Association, Judge Chin said that lawyers trying to screw each other during a case's discovery phase had seemed an ugly problem to him from his first days on the bench. "Maybe I had traveled in different circles, but when I started sitting, I was just amazed at how many problems there were."

Lawyers often stop their fighting when he pipes up. But sometimes not. He warned the crowd of 150 lawyers, "The trial judge can act in these instances as the accuser, fact-finder and sentencing judge."

Judge Chin's efforts at sanctions have drawn flak. In one 1997 case he dismissed, he fined lawyer Thomas Liotti for filing a frivolous lawsuit against Mariah Carey and her record company. The suit claimed that Ms. Carey had stolen song lyrics from Mr. Liotti's client. Mr. Liotti filed an appeal, and the higher court has overturned Judge Chin's dismissal. But the case has not yet been retried. "We had a legitimate claim, at least one that legitimately deserved to be argued," said Mr. Liotti. "I've had this stuck on my reputation, and there's nothing I can do about it."

There's no question Judge Chin is a Judeo-Christian ethics kind of guy. "He has the most deeply rooted sense of doing the right thing," said Anne Vladeck, one of his former law partners, "and if that means that it's coming down on one side or another harsh–or in what appears to be harsh–it's just the product of doing the right thing."

It happens to be that lawyers like Judge Chin. In the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary 's survey of judges, litigators rated him neutral, courteous and a good trial manager. He likes to sit down with lawyers after a case and dissect the action. Privately, attorneys said that they feared the wrath of Shira Scheindlin, who, like Judge Chin, was appointed by President Clinton, more.

Judge Chin, a Chinese immigrant, grew up in Hell's Kitchen. He attended Stuyvesant High School and Princeton University, then toiled at hoity-toity Davis Polk & Wardwell and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan, where then-assistant U.S. attorney Randy Mastro roasted him when he left the civil division for private practice.

Judge Chin has had mixed success with his decisions. In 1995, he ruled that Megan's Law violated the Constitution as written, but he was overturned. He got praise for his handling of a corruption trial involving a decorated cop, Alfonso Compres, in 1995. His reversal rate is about average among Federal judges in Manhattan.

Judge Chin is not a stick in the mud, insisted friends. One day this summer when his old partner, Mr. Patrick, was shuffling papers on Madison Avenue, Judge Chin called from the bungalow their families share in Montauk. "I'm on the beach," the judge told Mr. Patrick through his cell phone. And then the judge held the phone toward the waves. "Do you hear that?" he asked, laughing.

But decorum must be maintained. "You certainly don't have to be a gladiator or a killer to be an effective lawyer," he told the New York County Lawyers crowd on Sept. 8. "Juries don't like lawyers who are trying to be killers. Often you have a witness up there, and the lawyer is totally destroying them. And that may not be as effective as the lawyer thinks. Juries are forgiving. They will tolerate a little bit of lying.

"Whereas a judge," he continued, "might not."

Alhaja Kudirat Abiola Corner? Denied. Jackie Mason Way? Approved.

This pattern may look like the handiwork of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, but when it comes to the ceremonial renaming of New York streets, the man to call is Department of Transportation official Robert Adamenko. Testifying recently in a continuing lawsuit, Mr. Adamenko insisted the Mayor had nothing to do with any seemingly politically motivated denials. He was perfectly capable of turning down the requests himself.

Or was he? The lawsuit, filed in May at Federal District Court in Manhattan by an activist group that was denied a sign, alleges that Mr. Adamenko has been playing favorites in conferring temporary blue street signs. As a result, city lawyers spent July and early August in a familiar posture: typing up a defense that could possibly keep the administration out of constitutional hot water.

Lawyers from the city's Corporation Counsel's office have had to admit that Mr. Adamenko, an amiable Liberal Party operative who was hired for the job after he passed his résumé to party boss Raymond Harding, didn't follow the Department of Transportation's official, written policy on renaming streets. He rejected potentially controversial signs because they were politically sensitive-grounds not mentioned in the straightforward policy statement. He also granted dozens of signs promoting commercial and for-profit entities, something the policy statement explicitly bans.

Faced with the lawsuit, the administration's legal team might have quietly acknowledged the policy wasn't followed, redrafted and been done with the matter. But, no surprise, the Mayor's forces have decided to fight, contending that the agency policy is not a binding rule and that the city is not obligated to give a sign to people with clear political agendas. Which leaves them defending a record marked by inconsistency and questionable logic.

It's a little amazing that the temporary renaming program even exists, at least when you consider that the Mayor, who strove to eliminate the right to sell paintings on city streets, still allows anybody-O.K., most anybody-to exercise the right of expression by actually renaming streets. Residents can ask the transportation department to rename a street, and the agency will even install the sign, wrapped so it can be unveiled at one's very own dedication ceremony. There are only two conditions: A proposed honoree must fall into one of five approved categories, and the applicants must pony up the $250 cost of installing the sign. The renamings usually last for 30 days, and should not be confused with permanent, often political, renamings (e.g., Nelson and Winnie Mandela Corner, Joe Doherty Corner, Sharansky Steps), which are the handiwork of the City Council.

Mr. Adamenko, an assistant commissioner in charge of special events, obviously does not rubber-stamp every request. In 1997, he turned down the National Council on Islamic Rights' request for Yasir Arafat Way, writing that a sign couldn't be issued because Mr. Arafat wasn't dead. During a four-hour deposition on June 10. Mr. Adamenko testified that he actually denied the request for an Arafat street (one corner away from Yitzhak Rabin) because of the political fallout: "When you put him next to Rabin, the United Nations might be unhappy. And that's also politically sensitive because of fuses on both sides. At that time in the city, with the problems in Israel and what's going on in Palestine and all over, it's very, you know-."

In 1998, Mr. Adamenko approved 116 signs and denied only one. But it only takes one to prompt a lawsuit. The East Timor Action Network, or E.T.A.N., asked to rename the corners of 68th Street at Madison and Fifth avenues to commemorate the "1991 Santa Cruz Massacre," in which the Indonesian armed forces killed 271 people in Dili, East Timor. That would put the signs on either side of the block where the Indonesian Consulate is located. In October 1998, Mr. Adamenko said No, "due to the sensitive political nature of this request." He rejected a subsequent E.T.A.N. request, too, for a sign honoring a "Free East Timor." That, he held, was "very political" and would "inflame the diplomatic community."

Problem is, the department's written policy says only that renamings cannot "promote products, commercial entities, political parties and/or political candidates." According to Standard Operating Procedure 96-1, streets may be renamed to commemorate or promote "a public event of a not-for-profit nature; a cultural event; an event or person of historic significance; an individual who has made a significant contribution to New Yorkers; or a community or public service." The 1991 massacre would seem to qualify as an event of historic significance. Mr. Adamenko declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

E.T.A.N. has argued that the city used a clear double standard when assessing political controversy. Is their initial request to memorialize 271 slain East Timorese any more inflammatory than the blue "Esquina Hermanos al Rescate-Brothers to the Rescue Corner" sign fastened three years ago to the lamppost outside the Cuban Mission to the United Nations, which memorializes four Cuban-American anticommunist activists shot dead while flying near Cuba? That and other arguably controversial signs that have gone up, E.T.A.N. contended, constituted an invitation to "the public-at-large to use city street signs for expression."

Not so, said city lawyers. Mr. Adamenko was reasonable to deny E.T.A.N.'s requests because they would promote a political cause and, the lawyers claimed, the Department of Transportation has never put up a sign promoting political organizations or causes. (Some signs, like the one outside the Cuban Mission, went up by mayoral directive.) According to the city lawyers, "They are official highway signs, providing specified information in accordance with Federal highway sign requirements."

During the deposition, Mr. Adamenko explained his objections to the E.T.A.N. sign, to the Arafat sign and to "Alhaja Kudirat Abiola Corner," which would have memorialized an assassinated Nigerian dissident. "This is my interpretation, you know. I could be wrong, I could be right, but to have foreign policy on light poles in the City of New York when we have so much work addressing traffic mitigation … I don't want to fight the wars of the world on traffic signal poles and lamp poles. There has to be a different way."

According to one former transportation department official, who asked for anonymity to avoid being pulled into the suit, the policy statements were supposed to eliminate discretion. But Mr. Adamenko, who for 27 years ran a textile operation in the garment district, clearly used his discretion when it came to requests from stores and businesses. "It's good for the vitality of the city, the economic development. These are people who employ people in New York," Mr. Adamenko said.

That explains Hammacher Schlemmer Way, MTV Music Awards Street, Soul Man Way, Plaza Sesamo, Carnie Way, Bike to Work Week Boulevard, Yo Yo Ma Way, Henny Youngman Way (a 90th-birthday present), Indiscretion Way and, simply, S&P Personal Wealth, as well as the intersection of Beast Avenue and Beauty Way, usually known as 47th Street and Seventh Avenue.

But there has not been a J&R Music World Inc. Way. "This one is easy," Mr. Adamenko said at the deposition. The electronics store, which employs 600 and is right across from City Hall, had asked to temporarily change Park Row to J&R Row for its 25th anniversary and an accompanying music festival in City Hall Park. "The Brooklyn Bridge, once again, it's personal. That is one of the most beautiful bridges in the city, a historic site. And then again, I based it-I said no.… The thing with J&R, I would have done it if it was another location, but they got the park for a weekend. Then they got the big bands. And then they wanted the signs. Pretty soon they want to stretch it and have a party on the bridge."

Mr. Adamenko's other job is to keep track of such special events. His duties include checking the pavement and traffic flow for the 25 parades, the 1,200 street fairs, the bike-athons and the marathons, the block parties, the Con Edison crews, all of it. "Everything that moves in the city, I have to know about," he said. "I don't have the time to dedicate that much time to the signs, which is important, but I just don't have the time."

The city's time-squeezed sign guy is a likable, back-room-Charlie bureaucrat. "The nice thing about Bob," said one organizational leader who deals with him, "he's genial and amusing. That's very different than most people who work for the city." He's politically savvy, too, having outlasted two transportation commissioners: "He's a little Ray Harding, but not as grumpy," added the leader.

Maybe that's why he's not closely supervised. Mr. Adamenko testified that when he brought issues to "the Hall"-City Hall-they usually deferred to his interpretation. If they hadn't, he wouldn't have minded: "The Mayor can do anything he wants, ma'am, from my point of view," he told Nancy Chang, a lawyer of the Center for Constitutional Rights who is representing E.T.A.N. "He's the Mayor of the City of New York."

The legal arguments coming out of Mr. Adamenko's denial of an E.T.A.N. sign ended on Aug. 5, and now it's in the hands of Federal judge Robert Sweet. In July, the judge nudged the two sides to settle the practical half of the suit. A blue sign with "East Timor Way" in four-inch-high lettering was attached to the lamppost at Madison Avenue and 68th Street and scheduled to come down on Aug. 17. E.T.A.N's New York City coordinator, John Miller, said it is still pressing the constitutional claims to get a declaration that will clear up the law.

If Judge Sweet rules that Mr. Adamenko discriminated, it could mean the end for the sign program. Couldn't it? The Mayor's press office didn't call back, but that would seem to be an alluring possibility for a man who likes to run things. Or he might want to keep it, since it's so attractive to the city's business interests. Just in the past year, Mr. Adamenko has approved Nickelodeon Magazine Way, VH1 Fashion Avenue, People Magazine Way, Sheraton Four Points Way, HMV Way and Barbie Street.

Heck if a potential takeover of the New York City Police Department wouldn't be just the albatross to hang around the neck of a certain senatorial candidate-to-be. It would sully his vaunted crime-fighting record and–ugh–vindicate the Rev. Al Sharpton and his fellow campers outside 1 Police Plaza.

Facing this, the Mayor and the Commissioner announced on Aug. 10 that the Police Department was seriously considering adopting the Civilian Complaint Review Board's investigations of misbehaving officers as its own.

That's a big change–the civilian review panel, an independent body, has been one of the Mayor's and Commissioner's favorite punching bags. Now, no more extra layer of investigation by the police, and no more delays in prosecuting officers. It would seem to be an arrangement that would satisfy the Justice Department, plus soften the Mayor's and Police Commissioner's reputations as control freaks. Right off, The New York Times editorial board signed on.

But hidden inside Mr. Safir's olive branch is a prickly thorn–a cushy loophole that allows Police Department brass to, in essence, order a do-over if they don't like the review board's results. So much for relinquishing control.

According to a Police Department memo obtained by The Observer , Mr. Safir wants to be able to do something the law doesn't appear to let the department do: Shove the review board's guilty verdicts right back to the panel for them to reconsider.

That has some of the board's 10 members worried. "I'm suspicious of the motives behind this," said one board member, Earl Ward. "I think it's a direct response to the Eastern District probe. When this probe is over, eventually you'll have the N.Y.P.D. kicking a lot of cases back to us."

That rejection would be nothing new. During any given year this decade, at least half of the officers that the board deemed culpable enough to warrant punishment have not received even a slap on the wrist from the department. Federal prosecutors are looking at that fact pretty closely, to judge from the weight of material they have extracted from the review board.

But now Mr. Safir and the Mayor would like to, in essence, formalize that rejection by building it into the process. That's likely to spark more bureaucratic fights between the warring agencies.

And then there's the larger question of whether this would put the board under Mr. Safir's thumb. "If we can't put in his in-box any case that he doesn't want, where does that leave us?" said one review board source. "We can interview eight witnesses and they can always say we want you to investigate 12."

Marilyn Mode, the Commissioner's spokesman, said board officials are overreacting. "When you're leaving it up to them, how possibly could you construe this as abridging their independence? I still don't get it, you're asking them to take actions, asking them to go back and finish the job that they're mandated to do," she said.

Ms. Mode said that the department's stance is about standards, about "giving them more information so they can consider their decision." Why didn't the civilian panel have the information before? "They might have had access to the information, they might not have recalled it," she explained.

The review board was initially housed inside the department. It was moved out by the Charter Commission in 1993, and ever since the police have scorned its findings. Specifically, the department has ignored its work and rarely used the board's findings in departmental trials.

Instead, the Police Department's disciplinary team would do its own investigation–adding precious months to the process that would often swallow up witnesses or obscure additional evidence. As bad as this was for a civilian reeling from a negative encounter with police, it was just as bad for the police officers who were the targets.

In fact, the board's probes drag on for months, police officials like to point out. In 1995, the average investigative time on a complaint was 16 months; the statute of limitations for trying an officer is 18 months.

The board, meanwhile, blames the department for some of the delays. Board officials said department bureaucrats drag their feet, failing to produce roll calls, photo arrays, rosters of license plates, telephone records or other investigatory materials in a timely manner.

Yet Mr. Safir has been coming around. As the probe by Federal prosecutors hovers in the background, he has noticed that the board has hired more seasoned investigators, revamped its investigative method in the past two years, and lowered its average investigative time to seven months. As a result, in March, Mr. Safir first told board members he was exploring the possibility of giving them responsibility for investigations.

In July, deeming the board sufficiently improved, Mr. Safir decided to move ahead–a decision he said had no connection to the Federal investigation. He told Kevin Flynn of The Times that his plan "would make the C.C.R.B. totally independent as far as the investigations are concerned."

Mr. Safir first broke the news to a review board delegation during a meeting at 1 Police Plaza on July 29. They had gathered to discuss problems in their relationship–primarily review board folks' belief that the police could be cooperating more. At the meeting, said two people familiar with the board's workings, Mr. Safir offered to get information to the panel in a more timely fashion. Then he dropped the bombshell that the department would no longer rework their cases.

He never mentioned, however, the do-over clause. That came on Aug. 6, in a memo from Joseph Flynn, the director of the department's disciplinary assessment unit, to Gene Lopez, the executive director of the review board. On Aug. 12, two days after Mr. Safir and the Mayor announced the new plan, Mr. Flynn reiterated the demands in a nonconfidential memorandum to Mr. Lopez. "Reconsideration of cases would be fair to police officers, would enable the department to dispose of referrals in the most appropriate manner, and would underscore the C.C.R.B.'s commitment to the integrity of the entire civilian complaint process," he wrote.

A majority of board members is needed to implement any proposal, and right now the Mayor and the Commissioner have only a slight advantage. The board panel is made up of three former high-ranking police officials appointed by the Commissioner, three former prosecutors appointed by the Mayor and four members (usually lawyers) recommended by the City Council. The Mayor's contingent has two vacancies. A vote could come on Sept. 8.

Some of the board's members said the proposal is especially stinging, given their hopes and beliefs that the relationship between the two agencies was finally improving. Besides promising better access to crucial investigatory information, Mr. Safir has actually met with the board twice this year, after pretty much ignoring them in previous years. More crucially, Mr. Giuliani has said he would raise the board's budget 21.3 percent this year, after raising it 18.9 percent last year.

Mr. Ward said the Police Department could engage in case-dumping. "I am a little concerned that they will just send cases back to us as a way to clear out their backlog. To put it on our backlog instead of theirs," he said. At the end of 1998, the department had resolved only 19 of the 300 cases the board referred during the year.

"There has to be a time limit during which they could send the case back, say after three months, to say this needs further investigation, if this proposal is going to work at all," Mr. Ward said.

Ms. Mode conceded that justice could be delayed under the proposal, then put responsibility on the review board: "Well, that's something they need to be cognizant of, but if you're doing the investigation properly from the get-go, there shouldn't be any delay."

The cable network last year fired two producers, sacked correspondent Peter Arnett, split up its investigative team, issued a public apology to veterans and the estate of Richard Nixon, plastered a harsh retraction on its Web site and installed a new quality control vice president, yet its Operation Tailwind debacle refuses to stay safely consigned to the past.

CNN's questionable investigative exposé of a 1970 covert military mission has continued to have a colorless, odorless but devastating effect on the news network, not unlike the gas it contended U.S. forces had dropped on American defectors in Laos.

In the year since it aired the report, CNN has already paid costly settlements to 11 veterans who appeared on it. The network still faces nine defamation suits, filed in courthouses in Atlanta, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Little Rock, Ark., and other places. On July 20, a judge in Washington, D.C., ruled over CNN's objections that two of the nine suits can proceed and depositions should begin.

The most damaging of them may well be the suit filed by one of its own-or, more exactly, formerly one of its own-April Oliver, the producer fired over the broadcast. Her combative courtroom strategy and tone is set to collide with CNN's legal goals. The resulting messy court embarrassment is likely to cost CNN mightily in its pocketbook, raise afresh questions about the network's integrity and plunge its employees back into doubt and defensiveness.

That has a tangle of high-priced lawyers and their flock of associates busy in the CNN offices, dredging up videotapes and voluminous papers generated during Ms. Oliver's research.

Waiting for them are eager plaintiffs' lawyers such as Keith Mitnik. Mr. Mitnik represents Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, retired, commander of the U.S. military's covert Studies and Operations Group in the 1960's and later Lieut. Col. Oliver North's Iran-contra sidekick. In one section of the broadcast, General Singlaub was featured describing why it was desirable to kill defectors. His segment was then followed by charges that nerve gas was dropped on defectors and women, and children were killed during the mission. "I suspect we'll begin taking depositions in the next 90 days," Mr. Mitnik said from his skytop office in downtown Orlando. Fla. "There's going to be Peter Arnett and April Oliver, Ted Turner, Tom Johnson and Rick Kaplan. Aw, there's going to be a multitude. The deposition phase will involve between 20 to 40 depositions."

Not only will all these people be cross-examined by war veterans who believe that CNN put out lies just to make a splash. They will also have to contend with Ms. Oliver, who knows the network from the inside. She believes the real lies came after the broadcast, when CNN was scrambling to cover its ass.

Titled "Valley of Death," CNN's report unflinchingly leveled the alarming charges that in September 1970, American elite soldiers covertly used sarin nerve gas on U.S. servicemen who had defected to the enemy. The June 7, 1998, report ran as the kickoff of the NewsStand program, a collaboration between CNN and Time magazine that was CNN-USA president Rick Kaplan's great hope for a regular prime time audience, one that his bosses figured would showcase Time Warner synergy. Instead, soon after it aired, Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell phoned up to say sarin gas was never dropped, Soldier of Fortune magazine staged a pair of angry press conferences and veterans cluster-flamed Ted Turner's e-mail address. ("If you have any more information," Mr. Powell gently advised CNN chairman Tom Johnson, "you should get it out there.")

At first, the network stood firm, even airing a second broadcast the following Sunday reoffering its premise, with additional corroboration. CNN's top lawyer, David Kohler, who had vetted both programs, wrote a 16-page memorandum detailing CNN's sourcing. So sure was he, he wrote, that in one instance he had authorized the use of "confirmed" over the more prudent "corroborated." He reportedly remarked to a group of producers that the script was "bulletproof."

But as the attacks on the report continued, the network took a step back. It hired First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams for an internal investigation. Assisting him was, of all people, Mr. Kohler. After 10 days of reviewing the merits of the program, the lawyers issued a 55-page assessment that concluded the producers' reporting over eight months and 200 interviews had been, at best, inconclusive, leaving the allegations "insupportable." It concluded: "A decision was made by CNN to broadcast accusations of the gravest sort without sufficient justification and in the face of substantial persuasive information to the contrary." Later, Mr. Abrams said "the problem with the broadcast was never that its producers had doubts about it. It was that they did not."

That prompted CNN's retraction of sorts-a mea culpa that conceded the network had not nailed down the story before going with it. But the network insists that it is not guilty of defamation-that any errors were inadvertent and don't constitute actual malice, meaning they weren't done with reckless disgregard for the truth.

Nonetheless, CNN canned the report's two producers, Ms. Oliver and Jack Smith, and requested that the supervising producer, Pam Hill, resign. Mr. Arnett, the narrator of "Valley of Death," has since left for ForeignTV.com after CNN let his contract lapse.

Then the lawsuits began to roll in. A Charleston, S.C., lawyer named David Collins called up CNN on behalf of 10 Tailwind veterans, five of whom had been quoted and five of whom had been just pictured on the report. He sat down with Kevin Baine, a lawyer from Washington-based Williams & Connolly, and by November the two had cut a deal. Reportedly, the $750,000 settlement meant $100,000 for those who were quoted and $50,000 for those who were merely pictured. CNN also paid out $150,000 to Adm. Thomas Moorer, a key source for their report who later claimed his remarks had been improperly framed.

CNN has been in fight mode ever since. The lawyer in charge of keeping this bumpy case under control is Chris Bogart, Time Warner's 34-year-old whiz kid general counsel-elect, who has strong ties to Time Warner president Richard Parsons. (He won't take over as the company's top lawyer until next year, when Peter Haje steps down.) This is Mr. Bogart's maiden effort at high-profile crisis management and he's relying on his recently arrived litigation sidekick and fellow alumnus of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, 33-year-old Ed Weiss. Nicole Seligman, one of President Clinton's lawyers in the impeachment trial who is with Williams & Connolly, is steering the case day to day, along with associate Thomas Hentoff (son of Nat), with Mr. Baine joining in as necessary. The Observer asked one defense lawyer whether Tailwind was no big deal for Ms. Seligman, who is obviously used to matters complicated. "Not this complicated," said the lawyer, who asked for anonymity. "This is an unusual set of cases in many ways."

CNN might want to thank Ms. Oliver for that. The litigation got more tangled and interesting this past June, when she filed her suit charging defamation, breach of contract, fraud and intentional infliction of emotional distress-in other words, that CNN generally hung her out to dry. "Many of the so-called 'errors' in the broadcast are actually attributable to the CNN managers," she asserted in her 71-page complaint. "By blaming Oliver for these decisions and then firing her to appease high-level military officials, CNN maliciously destroyed Oliver's reputation as a journalist."

Ms. Oliver's attorney is Roger Simmons of Gordon & Simmons of Frederick, Md. Mr. Simmons represented Larry Flynt's friend Dan Moldea in his unsuccessful suit against The New York Times .

The suit leaves CNN and Time Warner over a strategic barrel. CNN's easiest defense against General Singlaub would be to blame Ms. Oliver. But she will do everything in her power to prove that, in fact, the story was properly reported and sourced according to the highest journalistic standards, throwing the legal responsibility back into CNN's court.

If Time Warner defends the value of her work, they look two-faced for firing her. If they attack her as incompetent, she will undermine them and throw the blame back to the network.

And her court papers show that Ms. Oliver is aiming for the big guns at CNN. She asserted in her complaint that drafts 14 through 44 of the script were circulated, including to CNN-USA president Rick Kaplan. She has accused network chairman Tom Johnson of public and private fibs: He told interviewer Steven Brill that she and Mr. Smith had persuaded him, before broadcast, of the show's bona fides. (Ms. Oliver said she never personally spoke to Mr. Johnson during the Tailwind research until he called to fire her.) She also claims that Mr. Kaplan assured them the Abrams-Kohler report that damned their work would not be released until they had a chance to respond.

Ms. Oliver is sure also to revisit the tormented statements that Mr. Kaplan made during the Tailwind panic. He reportedly said, "This is just a P.R. problem, it's not a news problem." He told the American Journalism Review , "I should have just said 'We'll hold it.' I should have just said, 'Never mind that Smith and Lane and Hill and Connor and legal and Time magazine are all happy.'"

Then there's Mr. Kohler, the CNN lawyer. "He was not the kind of attorney to tell you what you can't do. He helped you accomplish your goals. If you're doing investigative reporting, that's what you want," said Ed Turner, a former CNN news executive. But his turncoat lawyering, reviewing a program he had vetted, could leave him vulnerable. Ms. Oliver, of course, believes he put in the Abrams report what he thought the CNN executives wanted to hear.

"CNN, Time Warner and CCC [the insurance carrier] all have an interest in subverting the truth in this case," she wrote in her suit against the insurance carrier. "CNN and Time Warner's reputation in the media will be impaired if the truth comes out that it capitulated to the military establishment's demands over a story which was properly substantiated."

Beyond the likely factual conflicts are serious strategic questions about Ms. Oliver's tone. Martin Garbus, who served briefly as her lawyer until Mr. Bogart asked him to step aside, said her friendliness could be crucial to CNN's defense. "Let's assume the plaintiffs are saying Rick Kaplan knew such and such about the work. She can be up there and say, 'He had to know this because I sent him an e-mail,'" Mr. Garbus said. "Or she can say it a different way: 'I would assume he knew it because I sent him a message, but it's possible he didn't get it.' One implicates CNN executives and the other doesn't."

Mr. Mitnik and his client sound ready to go away for the right amount of cash: "I don't know, you would think they would want to do the right thing and right a wrong. They've acknowledged that story should never have gone forward. If they now lay down their gauntlet and go to war, then we'll go to war."

Paying off Mr. Singlaub wouldn't end the case, though. Procedural rules hold that a case cannot be dismissed until the cross-claim is tried. Which means Ms. Oliver's wrongful dismissal case and its allegations against CNN higher-ups get decided first.

Ms. Oliver sounds like she won't settle, despite the financial pinch that has followed the loss of her $60,000 CNN salary. (Her husband is a nonmedical neuroscientist.) "I finally came to the conclusion that I wanted to push it the whole way, take it to court and not take any little out-of-court settlement, to get it out in court for my reputation," she said.

She has spurned Williams & Connolly's two offers of a joint defense agreement, in which the two parties would cooperate in certain areas. On July 27, Williams & Connolly asked the court to sever Ms. Oliver's wrongful dismissal case, and send it to a court in Georgia. On Aug. 2, a Washington, D.C., judge ruled that Time Warner is obliged to pay for her lawyers and consolidated both of her complaints before the same judge.

Meanwhile, the hostility between CNN and Ms. Oliver would appear to be rising. On July 8, Ms. Oliver filed a second suit (25 pages), alleging that CNN, through its insurance company, has tried to coerce her cooperation by controlling her choice of lawyer. A letter included in court papers bolsters that allegation: In it, company lawyers demanded that she split from the first lawyer she chose (Mr. Garbus, who represents The Observer ); offered her only two choices of a replacement, both with links to Williams & Connolly; and suggested that the insurance carrier might stop coverage, putting at risk payment to her approved lawyer. "The whole thing is so twisted, I think they thought all along that I was a person who could be manipulated, that they'd give me a fancy name lawyer and everything would go O.K. for them," she said.

The pretrial has already set off legal squabbling in the CNN camp. Mr. Kohler has stepped back, allowing his supervising lawyers in New York, Mr. Bogart and Mr. Weiss, to control CNN's defense. For example, one early settlement offer was resolved by the New York team, not Atlanta. (The offer by General Singlaub's lawyer was rejected.) "There's a certain amount of tension between the Kohler group and the Bogart group," the lawyer said. "I think the New York group believes Kohler didn't distinguish himself very well with how he handled it." Put another way, he helped draft a handy, free, expert opinion on the inadequacy of CNN's work to any plaintiff who wants it.

Ms. Oliver has had her own legal tensions. After she was told to drop Mr. Garbus, she was represented by Michael Nussbaum, Seymour Hersh's lawyer. She grew wary, feeling he was too chummy with Mr. Baine of Williams & Connolly. "I decided I needed someone completely out of the K Street corridor," she said. Her concerns about him ended up in her complaint.

"The allegations in the complaint in so far as they relate to me are either entirely false or seriously misleading," said Mr. Nussbaum, who has been squabbling with her since May. "The notion that I am somehow in a conspiracy with Williams & Connolly is absurd. Or with CNN. I've never spoken with Chris Bogart. And I've never spoken with CNN and Time about this case. Never, ever." He declined to discuss with The Observer other details from the lawsuit.

Ms. Oliver's former colleagues are gritting their teeth at the thought that they're going to have to relive one of journalism's black eyes of 1998. "I have a colleague, he jumps through the roof whenever he hears April Oliver's name," said a CNN correspondent, who insisted on anonymity. "He says that if he reads one more time in the paper that she's a good journalist, he'll shoot the author." Office fact-gathering has already begun. "I was interviewed by Nicole Seligman in April as a precautionary measure," said one peripheral contributor to that broadcast. "She mostly wanted to know what I knew and when I knew it, a lot of it just basic facts."

Down in Orlando, Mr. Mitnik was gearing up for a broad, lingering battle. "Their lawyer at Williams & Connolly represented at a hearing there were maybe 2,500 documents, I don't remember how many, it may have been 10,000. It was a big number. Thousands. Days' worth. Two hundred videotapes."

The case hinges ultimately on Ms. Oliver's ability to prove she speaks the truth, or something reasonably close to it. If she can't convince a jury, she-or more likely CNN-will be held responsible for airing knowingly false statements.

"The Tailwind report was clearly false," asserted Mr. Mitnik. "The acts of killing women and child didn't happen, they never used sarin gas, and there was no hunting of American defectors. General Singlaub never called in any B-52 strikes to kill any soldiers to avoid embarrassment. He did not use lethal chemical weapons. He did not commit war crimes, as he was specifically accused."

Ms. Oliver remains unbowed. She said she is not surprised at the parade of special forces veterans now saying that she forced words into their mouths: "It's hardly surprising that some Tailwind sources are now recanting when they can win cash prizes from CNN."

Her reputation tarnished by the affair, she said she's had a difficult time finding work. She's applying to law school.

Here in New York City, barristers have called the efficiency proposal a good idea, overdue, important.

But mostly they call it madness.

Judge Lippman isn't asking lawyers for much. Simply: No more ignoring your cases for months on end. No more fudging your schedule. And no more sitting around gabbing during courthouse cattle calls.

"Some lawyers believe a case is like a fine wine, that it must be resolved when it's good and ready," said the judge. "The state-of-the-art court system doesn't believe that. The court has a responsibility to the public and to the litigants to move a case along." He's moving up deadlines, insisting that cases enter trial three to six months earlier than they do now.

Judge Lippman, second only to Chief Judge Judith Kaye in the state court hierarchy, started the user-friendly court improvements during the week of July 15: Litigants will be able to pay their $175 filing fee with a credit card. By the end of the summer, court administrators will post a listing of all the attorneys in the state on the Internet.

Those changes are just a prelude for Judge Lippman's real fireworks display.

As of Jan. 1, he's eliminating the current case assignment system, which at the civil courthouse at 60 Centre Street has consisted of three central traffic-cop judges doling out cases to other judges. Instead, each case will be assigned from the start to a trial judge who will handle it all the way to resolution. To further streamline, cases will be categorized when filed (three tracks: expedited, standard and complex) and follow an assigned schedule of deadlines (total discoverytime:5 months, 10 months and 13 months). The State Supreme Court in Manhattan already sorts cases by type and sends them to corrals of specialized judges, but further specialization is being anticipated.

Lawyers' main nightmare in this step-to-it scenario is that five different judges will order them to appear simultaneously in five different courtrooms. To avoid that, Judge Lippman is trusting a not-yet-tested, Big Brother-like computer program: Court clerks will begin entering every lawyer's scheduled state court appearances in the metropolitan area into a purportedly omniscient database that will be universally available on the Internet to judges and (after a slight delay) the public. That, too, will begin Jan. 1.

Harvey Weitz, the veteran plaintiffs' attorney, inveighed against the factorylike schedule. "It's a needless intrusion into our offices," he said. In most cases, he said, he wants to move to trial quickly. But in some-his lead-paint cases, for example-hurrying does no good. "You want to take those cases to trial when the injuries begin to manifest themselves; it's almost the later the better. But you have to start suit, so the parent understands you're working on the case. You do want to do your discovery. But it would be an injustice to go to trial."

"It will benefit the defense firms," Mr. Weitz continued. He contended that, under a time squeeze, plaintiffs will lose the chance to dig up records and to interview multiple witnesses. When their opponents stonewall, he added, the judges-under pressure to keep a fast-moving inventory-will look the other way. "Here's the judge-this has happened to us: 'What, this hasn't been done? This is past our standards and goals. Too bad! Discovery has been closed.' Or: 'Your witness canceled, huh? Well, you're past standards and goals, I don't care. Too bad, go try your case. Go get somebody else.' And the rules don't let you get somebody else!"

Poppy Quattlebaum, managing attorney at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, also lamented the go-quick mandate. "It's the parties' case! They often have particularly good reasons for not wanting to move fast. It costs more for their lawyers to work fast; it's more stressful. In matrimonial cases, you need them to get over their initial anger to negotiate effectively. As is the case in many personal disputes, time is sometimes an ally to settlement. Getting documents out of any city agency takes an awfully long time. Moving insurance companies is often uphill. All those things are issues in the real world of trying cases."

Face it, lawyers don't like to take orders, to have their options limited.

"They prefer judge-shopping, that's what it's all about," said Ross Sandler, director of the Center on New York City Law at New York Law School.

Judge Lippman has plenty of statistics that show action is needed. In New York County, the number of cases idling on the runway, ready for trial, rose from 7,483 cases in 1995 to 13,549 cases in 1998. The 1988 average of 480 filings for each Supreme Court Justice in New York City has risen dramatically to 648. Statewide, the number of civil cases filed in Supreme Court has risen from 134,103 in 1988 to more than 184,000 last year.

Delays? Over all, getting higher. Twenty-four percent of trial-ready cases in Supreme Court are past the 15-month standard, and 46 percent of cases still in pretrial stages have lingered past their goal. Judge Lippman blamed the trial assignment system: "It's like trying to force the entire caseload through the neck of a bottle."

A scholar said the court administrators were wise to change the existing system. "Shuffling cases around the court system is a bad idea; it's very hard for the judges to be on top of the litigants," said Fordham University law professor Matthew Diller. "In the Federal system, the litigants always know they have to answer to the same judge, so when they engage in shenanigans, they know they're going to be right back in front of the same judge."

But even if everyone was ready to speed things up, few lawyers are convinced the revamping will succeed. "You could practically double those deadlines and get somewhere near realism," said Ms. Quattlebaum. Personal injury lawyer Peter Frankel envisioned a lot of hurry-up-and-wait: "We lived through this in the 80's, now we'll see it all over again: cases being pushed on the calendar. It's going to be a tidal wave for the judges with all these notes of issues coming in, people saying we're ready to go to trial. There'll be horrific backlogs, and you won't get trials, because the judges will be swamped. And we'll be stuck there."

Judge Lippman countered that "this is not a night and day change. Much of what it will consist of we have already introduced. It is evolutionary and measured."

His plan adopts the arrangement used by Manhattan's showcase divisions for matrimonial and complex commercial cases. In those divisions, the judges manage cases from cradle to grave and rely on laptops (also a few extra clerks). Judge Lippman believes the proof is in the court-compiled statistics: In 1992, the Supreme Court disposed of contract cases in an average of 648 days; the Commercial Division in 1998 disposed of contract cases in an average of 552 days. "Despite the complexity of many of these cases, they were resolved quickly and efficiently," the judge wrote in his restructuring proposal. The average commercial case started trial 81 days after a request came in.

Nonetheless, all but one of the city's bar associations have panned Judge Lippman's total elimination of the trial assignment system. The one group that has offered support, the elite Association of the Bar of the City of New York, gave a thumbs-up for the philosophy but premised their approval on Judge Lippman finding an adequate solution to the looming "havoc" of scheduling conflicts.

That solution will be the all-knowing computer. The current tracking computers introduced in 1986 have been replaced in judges' chambers by a PC network served by a computer located in upstate Troy. According to Noel Adler, head of the court system's information and technology division, with the new software, every scheduled hearing or conference will be entered into the computer by judge's clerks. If a lawyer claims a scheduling conflict, the judge will be able to look up the case schedule right at the bench. Mr. Adler expected that attorneys will be listed by their name and their Office of Court Administration (O.C.A.)'s registration number.

There's understandable skepticism within 60 Centre that the court can, in six months' time, shape itself into a clean, efficient distributor of justice. On the morning of July 14, deputy county clerk Jim Rossetti walked a touring group of blue-chip lawyers (an easy 3.5 credits toward the mandatory continuing legal education requirement) past piles of ripped boxes and rusted water fountains. Mr. Rossetti stopped in Room 141B in the basement and, while he showed the gray suits how to scan all of Donald Trump's litigation on the vintage 1986 dumb green computer screens, someone asked him whether the computers upstairs worked the same way.

"That's one of our big problems in the courthouse," he replied, "there's no integration. We have two separate and distinct computer systems here. Actually, three if you count the judgment docket and lien computer. It's something that John Werner and I have argued with O.C.A. about for a long while, and I don't know why they can't comprehend it."

Judge Lippman said the attorney-tracking computer program will be perfected in time for its rollout in six months. "It better be ready," said Judge Lippman, "or there's going to be a lot of trouble."

Will the staff be ready? As the Fund for Modern Courts will explore in an upcoming report, New York's court clerks are still struggling with civility and helpfulness. Now, they're also being asked to master an unfamiliar and undoubtedly buggy computer system. One courthouse insider is guardedly hoping the staff will catch on. "That's a continuing struggle we're working on all the time. Obviously, change is all around us."

They will be given systemic retraining. Three court administration higher-ups, each an "assistant deputy chief administrator," are coordinating the tutoring: computer guy Mr. Adler, Margaret Morton from the Division of Human Resources and Nancy Mangold from the Division of Court Operations.

Ms. Quattlebaum of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft sees a lot of basic implausibility in the changeover, particularly with the attorney-tracking computer. "It requires lawyers giving the right information to the right person. That sounds like a nightmare."

To Mr. Frankel as well. "Clerks, it's like water, it reaches a level. Clerks have a certain ability but you can only expect so much," he said.

It will help when those downstairs computers and those upstairs computers start talking to each other … sometime. Best estimate is a year to 18 months. "God willing," said Judge Lippman. "It only makes sense. That's the ultimate goal."

Meanwhile, Judge Lippman has been giving pep talks. He was at the Renaissance Westchester Hotel in White Plains on July 13 and 14 offering advice during the summer break for judges' training seminars. "I believe the great bulk of judges want to be judges, and part of that is to manage your own cases. Right now, two or three judges control everything, while everyone else sits around twiddling their thumbs. And the cases pile up."

Of course, that's so, even though court administrators have been preaching their hurry-it-up philosophy for years. "They love to crunch the numbers," said one Supreme Court jurist. "From an administrative point of view, when they see there's a problem, they think that maybe they need to crunch some more numbers. They have statistics of statistics."

Some judges said they've learned to play the game. "Inventory can be worked down in many wonderful ways," said Judge Elliot Wilk. "I have between 500 cases and 1,500 cases. I can get my inventory from 1,500 to 500 in a week. How? I trust other judges know this: You mark 'presumed settled.' You haven't heard from the parties, they probably settled but didn't call."

Still, many longtime judges are gritting their teeth, ready for another Great Court Adventure, knowing that 60 Centre Street always winds up being 60 Centre Street: slow and infuriating.

"Judges are resigned to doing whatever they're told to do," said a judge. "Most who have been around, though, know that it'll be a bust. It will always be a bust until there's more people to handle the overload. Only if they have two magistrates assigned to every judge would you ever get things moving. No one believes it will work until that happens."

You can reach N.Y. Law by confidential e-mail at mfleischer@observer.com.

The marriage had, at one point, seemed unlikely. The two firms had eyed other firms, considered other ways to scramble to the top of international legal practice and reap the profits that would follow. "I think it is ideal. It works-that's what makes it ideal," he said with a smile.

Mr. Cranch said he continues to hear from people who don't think it will happen. The New York Law Journal recently quoted leaders of a couple of British firms, who anonymously declared that this merger wasn't the real launch of the trans-Atlantic legal megafirm. Why? Because Clifford Chance's marriage partner is merely a Top 20 New York firm, not a Top 5.

Mr. Cranch thinks financial titans on both sides of the Atlantic-"the Merrill Lynches, the Goldman Sachses, the Morgan Stanleys"-will recognize Clifford Chance Rogers & Wells' ability to negotiate cross-border deals. "The image we want to put in people's minds is that it is a new firm, and it's a combination of these two capabilities. And using the two names together, it's not an English firm with a U.S. branch, it is a brand-new global firm," Mr. Cranch said.

To be sure, the merger right now is only as real as the faith in it. "We don't know them well," one Rogers & Wells partner conceded. "But it'll work out fine. They're entrepreneurial about how they view the practice."

Others say it will happen only because the leading partners will it to happen. "This is a firm where the partners without power are afraid of the partners with power," a former Rogers & Wells partner said.

Indeed, most of Rogers & Wells' partners only met their new bosses for the first time on Monday evening, June 14. At 5 P.M., the senior partner of Clifford Chance came to a Rogers & Wells conference room on the 53rd floor of the Met Life Building to deliver a pep talk. Get ready, New York, said banking lawyer Keith Clark. Clifford Chance Rogers & Wells is here! He and Mr. Cranch took turns steering a Powerpoint demonstration, which flashed a map of the firm's 26 offices and outlined the supposed strengths and strategies of the new firm. Firm patriarch Bill Rogers, 86, watched along with everyone else.

"You say the name Clifford Chance and the reaction you get is a very, very strong global law firm," Mr. Cranch said in presenting the new reality. One lawyer piped up and asked whether Tony Blair and Bill Clinton had blessed the union. Everyone went up to the Sky Club for cocktails afterward.

Rogers & Wells requires a simple majority for the merger to pass, with votes weighted by each lawyer's principal in the firm. Clifford Chance insists on a 75 percent vote. If successful, the new firm won't legally form until Jan. 1. The final prospectus, with the final compensation details, has not yet been given to Rogers & Wells lawyers. According to partners at Rogers & Wells, Clifford Chance's 60 New York lawyers will move into the Rogers & Wells offices. The new firm will adopt the ways and nomenclature of Clifford Chance.

That includes pay, too. But only eventually. A two-year, four-month transitional period will begin in January, during which the two firms will divide the profit percentage-wise, according to each firm's contribution. (Mr. Cranch said that Rogers & Wells' profit per partner last year was $740,000.) During the transition, Rogers & Wells leaders will dole out pay to Rogers & Wells attorneys. But that's over in 2002, when the modified lockstep compensation system Clifford Chance uses will prevail. (The ceiling will be stretched so that $2 million earners Kevin Arquit, Steven Newborn, Robert King and John Kidd don't take major steps back.)

Mr. Cranch will not be firing anybody. "No one has been asked to leave because of the merger," said one partner, "That's not to say no one will be asked to leave, but it's not due to the merger." Already defecting: litigator Richard Cirillo, who went to the New York office of Atlanta's King & Spalding, and John Keitt, who is heading to Dewey Ballantine. Both gave notice on June 11.

Now the two firms are trying to steer client work to each other, and are expecting to make joint client presentations in the fall. "Following the partnership vote, we will try to run the two firms as one," Mr. Cranch said. That means you might want to look for Rogers & Wells' litigators in the department the Brits currently call "contentious business."

The romance began in San Francisco in March 1998. Mr. Cranch and Clifford Chance partner Stephen Hood met while making presentations at a law firm management seminar. They went out to a restaurant afterwards and each firm leader marveled at the other's performance. "We agreed maybe there's something here to talk about. Both of us knew what that meant," Mr. Cranch said of the walk back to the hotel. Talks picked up late last fall, and negotiating sessions were held in Boca Raton, Fla., and Wimbledon, among other places.

Now the two firms are trying to distill their commitment into a contract. The final prospectus is expected to be ready the last week in June. Helping to write it are the negotiating team: mergers-and-acquisitions head John Healy, executive director Dick Killian, Mr. Cranch, and litigator John Carroll. Also steering are Mr. King, the corporate head (former partners said he's been groomed as future head of the firm); tax partner David Moldenhauer; and international corporate partner Dick McDermott, "the sort of guy you could leave alone in a room with your money on the table," according to one former partner.

Clifford Chance is getting a good leader in Mr. Cranch, said one former partner. "He's done a tremendous job of picking that firm off its ass."

Now he'll have to make sure everyone is ready for the move into the future. "At one point, an associate asked me, 'Is this going to be better for Clifford Chance or for us?'" recalled a Rogers & Wells partner. "I said, 'How can it be one or the other? We'll be part of Clifford Chance. We're going to build one very strong institution; the combined firm will have a major head start over every other firm in the world, and your job is to maintain that head start. And increase it.'"

At first, there will be more enthusiasm than business. "There's not one person who doesn't want to be in Paris or London for six months," said a partner. Will they feel the same way about Dubai or Ho Chi Minh City?

Standing in the doorway to the firm on the 52nd floor, where the sign will soon have a Clifford Chance pasted before the Rogers & Wells, Mr. Cranch paused to reflect on how the process has evolved. Initially, he acknowledged, some partners didn't appreciate the world-domination potential here. "Some partners were focused on the strengths of the domestic practices," he recalled.

"There were a lot of … conversations," he added. He put his hands in his slate-gray pockets, and rocked forward, as if he could not contain his enthusiasm. "It's a good idea. It's what intrinsically made sense for the firm. And it has the power of what's true," he said.

Then he smiled. The tippy-top of the Chrysler Building loomed through the window off to his right. On to the rest of the world.

You can reach N.Y. Law at mfleischer@observer.com.