Rebecca Ditsch

Then: Associate, employee benefits, Chadbourne & Parke (two years) and Fried Frank (two and a half years).

Now: Owner of The Farmer’s Daughter, a Brooklyn bakery. Also does legal research for a publishing company.

On law firm life: “I was a great associate because I was stressed out all the time, and my boss loved that.”

On similarities between her current and former careers: “I like being around people who appreciate that precision is important. That’s what I like about baking, too: the precision. I take a lot of pride in making a beautiful—and delicious—cake.”

On the pay gap: “I make approximately 40 percent of what I did when I left the firm four years ago (excluding bonus).”

On her new life: “I used to pay people to do things for me, and now I do them for myself.”

Melissa Graham

Then: Partner, state and local tax litigation, McDermott Will & Emery, Chicago (10 years).

Now: Co-owner of Monogramme Events, a catering company specializing in sustainable cuisine and organic ingredients.

On law firm life: In law school, she was already thinking she would leave the profession after a few years, once she had saved enough to start her own business. “The fact that I lasted so long was a surprise even to me.”

On similarities between her current and former careers: Client development is key. “At a big firm, that consisted of learning how to play golf, and then going to dinner and talking about golf. Now, I go out for coffee or dinner all the time.”

On the pay gap: Was making “over $200,000” a year when she left her firm; now earns approximately $60,000.

On her new life: She loves what she does now, but remains in touch with her lawyer friends. “The last three events that I’ve done have been for McDermott partners.”

Robert Kindler

Then: Partner, corporate (mergers and acquisitions), Cravath, Swaine & Moore.

Now: Vice chairman of investment banking, Morgan Stanley. Previously at JPMorgan Chase, where he served as global head of M&A.

On law firm life: “It was good. I loved Cravath. But after having done it for 20 years, it’s good to have a different experience. The aspects of doing it from a banker’s side are a lot different. You’re focusing on the business rather than the legal aspects.”

On increased career mobility: “When I started in the law, in 1980, people didn’t move around a lot. Now young people starting out in law or business expect that they’re going to have three or four different careers in their time.”

On his new life, and whether he’d ever return to practicing law: “I think it would be hard to go back to the law after having spent seven years with a lot more interaction with CEOs of companies.… You really don’t have that as a lawyer anymore.”

Saira Rao

Then: Associate, corporate, Cleary Gottlieb (almost three years).

Now: Novelist. Author of Chambermaid, a Devil Wears Prada for federal law clerks, published in June.

On law firm life: Cleary was “a nice place to work. People tell stories about law firms being horrible so much that I had low expectations.… I found it surprisingly pleasant. I met some great people who have become great friends.”

On the pay gap: “In ‘Jenny From the Block,’ Jennifer Lopez croons: ‘I used to have a little, now I have a lot.’ I am the reverse J-Lo.”

On her new life: “I prefer writing to working in law, maybe because I like being my own boss and working for myself.”

Charles Star

Then: Associate, litigation, three firms (six years).

Now: Stand-up comedian. Also works as a contract attorney.

On law firm life: “The complete lack of control that you have over your own schedule is very frustrating.… You mostly serve the purpose of being a warm body to do things that other people simply don’t want to do. You’re overpaid for your skills and underpaid for the psychological trauma.”

On whether he incorporates his law firm experiences into his comedy: “Most of what I find funny about working at a law firm is way too ‘inside baseball’ to someone who isn’t a lawyer.… There are things about law firm culture that I think are not any different from other office culture. Like when a meeting breaks up, everyone runs to where the uneaten sandwiches are.”

On his new life: “I didn’t like being a lawyer, and I didn’t like the work. I quit to do stand-up.”

Another partner in his 30’s, at one of New York’s top firms, agreed—but with more anxiety than enthusiasm.

“We’re supposed to care about Aristotle and Plato, and they’re supposed to care about Mammon,” he said, comparing lawyers to finance types. “But now we lawyers care about money.”

“There’s no question that law firms are becoming more like businesses,” said Peter Zeughauser of the Zeughauser Group, a legal consulting firm. “The trend has been around for a good 25 years, but it has accelerated. The competitive pressures have increased dramatically over the last 5 to 10 years. This forces firms to become more businesslike in running themselves.”

One can argue over whether it’s a good or bad thing, and one can also argue about how long it has been going on. But most observers agree that large law firms are becoming more business-oriented, more focused on efficiency and profits—in short, more like investment banks, hedge funds and other money-making machines.

It’s a noteworthy shift for the legal profession, whose denizens like to think of themselves as intellectual types—and view their Wall Street cousins as money-obsessed philistines. Many angst-filled attorneys suspect they should have gone into something more tweedy and creative than relocating commas within merger agreements. As Clarence Darrow said, “Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.”

Such questions of professional identity aren’t just theoretical; they have ramifications for law firms as businesses. If law firms become “just like banks,” but with smaller paychecks, firms may lose their appeal to the talent they must attract in order to thrive.

“The law firms in this culture place so much emphasis on compensation,” said the young partner in New York, who insisted on anonymity, like many of the lawyers contacted for this story, because of firm policies against talking to the press. “But if you end up putting money as the aspiration, inevitably money takes on a power that can transcend the greatness of the craft that you’re learning. When money is what motivates, and money is offered in a higher quantity, people will take the money.”

Not unlike the Mafia, Big Law—the moniker used, with a mixture of respect and resentment, to refer collectively to large law firms—must ask itself, What is this thing of ours? Is the American law firm still a professional partnership servicing clients, or is it just another vehicle to a seven-figure income, but with “LLP” instead of “Inc.” at the end?

“This has been historically the most profitable period for large law firms,” said Brad Hildebrandt of Hildebrandt International, a law-firm consulting firm. The nation’s 100 top-grossing firms as ranked by The American Lawyer magazine are more profitable than ever. In 2006, the average profit per partner was $1.2 million; at New York’s top ten shops, it was $2.67 million (see chart below).

Some of this legal lucre trickles down to associates—the young lawyers who are employees of the firms, working long hours on often mind-numbing tasks, in the hope of someday making partner. Salaries for first-year associates, fresh out of law school, were raised earlier this year to $160,000. Senior associates, about to be considered for partnership (generally 8 to 10 years out of law school), earn just under $300,000—before bonus. (Bonuses at the big firms tend to be less jaw-dropping than at investment banks, in the range of $50,000 for a midlevel associate.)

“Firms in New York do better than everyone else,” said Ward Bower of Altman Weil, a law-firm consulting firm. “Deal flow has been great, with record numbers of mergers and acquisitions. Almost all of that work goes to New York firms.”

It’s not just merger mania fueling those Saturday afternoon shopping trips to BMW of Manhattan. Other hot legal practice areas include capital markets, patent litigation, and hedge fund and private equity work (like the recent public offering of the Blackstone Group, which could usher in a wave of private equity IPOs).

So what does a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore need to fret about—aside from whether to buy a summer place in the Hamptons or Litchfield County?

Well, nothing, except the future.

Indeed, however profitable they might be right now, law firms are finding they must focus on the bottom line to stay on top of a rapidly changing market for legal services. As a senior partner at a national law firm said, “It’s like we’ve been hit by an asteroid, and soon all the dinosaurs will be gone.”

MUCH OF THE DRAMATIC GROWTH in law firm profits over the past few years can be chalked up to rate increases: charging clients more for each hour of a lawyer’s time. “Legal problems are more complex, and companies are more nervous about them,” said a senior in-house lawyer at a Fortune 500 media company. As a result, large companies like his have been willing to pay increasingly large fees to outside law firms, to handle matters that the companies’ own internal lawyers, or in-house counsel, can’t deal with on their own. But now clients are turning cost-conscious.

“Clients are becoming more sophisticated,” said Mr. Zeughauser. “They’re not going to send all of their work to the high-rate firms. They’re only going to send their most important work.” More routine matters will be handled in-house, or sent to less expensive law firms. (Hello, New Jersey!)

When clients do award work to top-shelf firms, they’re driving harder bargains. “Clients are reconsolidating legal work in a smaller number of firms, so they can manage it more effectively,” said Mr. Bower. “They use leverage over the firms which benefit from the reconsolidation to control fees and rates.”

Getting billed by the hour can be expensive for clients, who get stuck with an unexpectedly big tab if a matter turns out to be unexpectedly time-consuming. Alternatives to the billable hour are gradually emerging, such as flat fees for handling a matter from start to finish; percentage fees, in which the firm’s fee represents a cut of the total amount involved in the matter; and discounted billing rates, if the company sends the law firm a large volume of work.

The upshot: law firms are finding it increasingly difficult to treat clients as gravy trains.

As clients become more hostile to fee increases, law firms are responding by focusing on so-called “premium,” “high-value,” or “rate-insensitive” work—matters that the client will pay a king’s ransom for, without complaint.

Such work doesn’t grow on trees. It grows on business-generating partners—the rainmakers. So firms are increasingly preying upon one another for superstar lawyers, who have cases and clients, or “books of business,” that they take from firm to firm.

“There’s a tremendous amount of movement [by partners] between law firms. The competition for senior talent is very high,” said Mr. Hildebrandt. “You used to go to a law firm and you’d stay for life. That’s just not the case any more. Lawyers change jobs in the way that businesspeople change jobs.”

Statistics bear this out. Every year, The American Lawyer reports how many partners at the 200 largest law firms jumped from one firm to another. In recent years, the total number of such lateral partner moves has consistently been north of 2,000 a year.

If a firm wants to lure top rainmakers, it needs robust profits per partner. “PPP is the closest thing we have to share price,” said one young partner at a national firm. “It’s the best way to signal to lateral partners that your firm is financially strong and has upside potential.”

There are two ways for a firm to increase its profits per partner: It can grow its profits or reduce its partnership. Several prominent firms have picked the latter option. They can effectively fire underperforming partners, by “counseling” them to go elsewhere. Firms can also “de-equitize” laggard lawyers—demoting them to the status of non-equity partner, so they retain the title of “partner” (good for cocktail parties), but without sharing in the firm’s profits.

This process of “de-equitization” was once highly unusual and quasi-scandalous, given the traditional understanding of law firm partnership. “Making partner was like becoming member of a fraternity,” said Mr. Bower. “You couldn’t be kicked out of the fraternity unless you killed another member. Now there’s no tenure. It’s ‘What have you done for me lately?’; it’s ‘Eat what you kill.’”

Although de-equitization has yet to take hold among the most elite Gotham shops, it is being adopted by national firms with sizable New York offices. Several months ago, Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw, a national firm headquartered in Chicago, used it to get rid of 45 partners. One of its Chicago rivals, Jenner & Block, plans to de-equitize 15 to 20 partners by the end of 2007.

Times have changed from the days when, once you made partner, you were guaranteed a lucrative job for life—and might even get home in time for dinner while the associates stayed late at work. “Today, partners work harder than associates,” said Mr. Zeughauser. “The demands of partnership are immense, in terms of developing business and helping run the firm.”

As a result, partnership doesn’t have the same allure it once did, despite being more lucrative than ever. Law firms arguably have taken some of the traditional perks of partnership—job security, collegiality, work-life balance—and traded them in for more pieces of silver.

“The super-prize of partnership isn’t so super anymore,” said Marc Galanter, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and coauthor of Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm. “You never get to a point of repose. There’s always this competition going on.”

A former associate at a large firm, now at a media company, put it bluntly: “I would look at the partners and they were all overweight, on their second or third wives, heart attacks waiting to happen. I would think, ‘Is this what I get in the end?’”

IF ASSCOIATES ARE NO LONGER as interested in partnership, this naturally poses a problem for law firms. Firms make their money by providing professional services. Attracting and retaining the very best professionals, from senior partners on down to first-year associates, is critical to their success.

“Every law firm is a seller in the market for legal services and a buyer in the market for legal talent,” said Mr. Bower. “Ultimately, all they have to sell is what they’re able to buy.”

These days hiring and retaining lawyers is the greatest challenge for firms, according to several law firm partners and industry consultants.

“Our biggest problems are supply side,” said one partner at a national firm. “We need to attract and retain people who can do great work.”

American law schools churn out roughly 40,000 graduates a year, a number that hasn’t budged much in the past 10 years. Strong demand for new associates, combined with static supply, is driving up the price of talent.

Associate starting salaries have been climbing fast. In January, Simpson Thacher led the latest round of pay raises, which took starting salaries from $145,000 to $160,000. That came less than a year after the previous raise, led by Sullivan & Cromwell’s move from $125,000 to $145,000. In both cases, everyone quickly followed the leader.

But given firms’ seemingly insatiable demand for new recruits, expect more raises in the not-too-distant future. Peter Zeughauser believes the next raise will be to $200,000 and could take place “as early as within the next six months. On the outside, 12 to 18 months. And a move to $250,000 after that.”

The need for firms to ante up more money stems in part from the less stable nature of partnership. “As the odds of getting the prize [of partnership] go down, and the prize itself is somewhat compromised by the fact that partnership now comes without the real guarantee of tenure, the present value of the prize goes down,” said Professor Galanter. “Then people say, ‘O.K., if I’m not getting this big prize, I want more cash now.’ And that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”

Recent law school graduates, many of whom carry debt into the six figures, generally rejoice at higher salaries. But this may be a case of “be careful what you wish for.” According to Arnold & Porter partner James Sandman, former president of the bar in Washington, D.C., (where top firms recently raised associate salaries to match those of New York): “There is no free lunch. Higher salaries inevitably mean higher billable-hour expectations and even less work–life balance.”

Thus it remains to be seen if the pay raises will address “associate attrition”—young lawyers departing prematurely, after firms have invested in their training and development, but before the years in which they’d be most profitable for the firms.

According to Irene Dorzback, assistant dean in the Office of Career Services at New York University School of Law, firms “believe that the way to retain [associates] is to increase the salaries. But the thing that associates are looking for more than anything else is work-life balance.”

In fact, increasing salaries may actually lead associates to leave firms sooner rather than later. Said Ms. Dorzback: “Students come into the office after each pay raise and ask, ‘Can you help me reassess my debt? How long do I have to stay [at a firm] now?’”

“They’re throwing more and more money at 26-year-old graduates, and people are still leaving law firms in droves,” said Melissa Lafsky, an ex-associate and author of the Opinionistas blog, in which she chronicled the more depressing realities of law firm life. “People still leave, and they still hate it.”

When confronted with the question of what makes law firm practice attractive these days, partners start sounding like high school guidance counselors. They respond to the question with a question: Well, what are your goals?

“You have to ultimately make the decision about what you want in life,” said Morton A. Pierce, cochairman of Dewey Ballantine. “If you want to make $100 million potentially in a year, you’re not going to make that in a law firm. Certainly it’s no secret that hedge fund people make more. You have to ask yourself what your goals are.”

Fair enough. But aside from paying off their student loans, what do young lawyers aspire to? Nobody seems to know anymore. “The Gen Y people don’t really have the same desires and goals as previous generations,” said a managing partner at one prominent firm. “I think they don’t get the same fulfillment out of this.”

A partner at a rival firm is more sanguine: “What firms can and should offer people is the ability to take part in the craft, teach them how to be great lawyers, make them understand that life is about much more than money. You can contribute to society as a lawyer in ways that other people aren’t trained or licensed to do.”

“Law is an attractive, challenging profession,” said Mr. Zeughauser. “Some people enjoy the challenge, and there’s also a service aspect that some people enjoy. There are people who like being in the service profession, and the law is probably the highest-earning service profession.” (It sure beats the green aprons off Starbucks.)

For the moment, Big Law shops are still thriving, bright young people still troop off to law school and Davis Polk partners continue to buy boats. And some claim the tension between the economic and professional aspects of legal practice is being exaggerated.

“You’re going to find people who are going to tell you this is becoming a business and more cutthroat, but my view is—and I may be in the minority here—people have been focused on this as a business for as long as I can remember,” said Dewey Ballantine’s Mr. Pierce. A focus on profits has existed “as long as The American Lawyer has been around,” he added. Several industry observers assert that after the influential trade publication started ranking law firms by revenues and profits, firms become obsessed with climbing the totem pole, like college deans fixated on U.S. News & World Report rankings.

So is it all The American Lawyer’s fault? Said the publication’s current editor-in-chief, Aric Press, “I harbor deep doubts that our magazine introduced the idea of greed into a previously Edenic profession.”

—with additional reporting by Tom Denison, Oliver Haydock, Julia Heming, Alex Jacobs, Vince Levy, Andrew Mangino, Nora Marie Matson, Dotty McLeod, Edon Ophir, and Sarah Sabshon

The letter thanked protesters who had appeared at a rally to condemn the accused students before they were found guilty in a court of law.

“It communicated to a fair-minded person in Durham that the people who taught these guys believed they were guilty,” he said.
Mr. Johnson’s posts, on an academic blog called Cleopatria, formed the seeds of a personal blog he then launched to cover the case.
Called Durham-in-Wonderland, over the past year it has become an influential source for those skeptical of the case against the students, two of whom thanked him personally when they were exonerated by the North Carolina Attorney general last week.

On a recent afternoon, Mr. Johnson, 39, who usually appears in photographs Tucker Carlson-style in a bow-tie, wore jeans and a loose white shirt. Sitting on his desk in a 1950s-era building was a copy of The News & Observer’s issue the day after the announcement, which he has held on to because it shows one of the accused students cracking a rare smile.
(Mr. Johnson, who traveled to North Carolina 12 times to cover developments in the case, blogged live from the suite where the players and their lawyers watched the press conference.)

“When I got hired my clients said ‘You’ve got to read this guy--he knows all about this case,’” said James Cooney III, a lawyer representing one of the lacrosse players. “I was shaking my head saying, ‘The last thing I need is a history professor telling me how I run a legal case.’”

But before long the blog became his first read in the morning, and he used information obtained by Mr. Johnson to argue for a change of venue.

The original ad from the “Group of 88” was taken down from the Duke website, but Mr. Johnson had a still-working link. He also reported that a woman who would become a staffer on the District Attorney’s re-election campaign had called for a crowd to burn down the house where the alleged incident took place.

People in North Carolina started talking to me. I mean I’m a professor, not a reporter, but you know, the blog broke a few stories,” he said sheepishly. “This was not my intent when the thing started.”

More than 500 posts later, Mr. Johnson is co-writing a book on the affair with National Review writer Stuart Taylor, due out in September. He plans to continue his blog at least through the June ethics trial of District Attorney Michael Nifong for, among other things, withholding exculpatory DNA evidence from defense lawyers.

Prior to this Mr. Johnson was most famous for a tenure battle that he fought and won. Denied tenure in 2002, he challenged the basis for it, concluding that colleagues had voted against him because he had been deemed “uncollegial.” The Board of Trustees for the City University of New York reversed the decision.

It appears that at least some of Mr. Johnson’s own experience prepared him to come at this story with an academic’s insider perspective, and a questioning attititude toward what he calls “Academic Groupthink.”

“This is one of the darkest episodes in the history of American higher education,” said Mr. Johnson, referring to the letter signed by those 88 professors. “These were people who seemed to me to have betrayed the profession. They were supposed to stand up for due process and instead they went after their students.”

The dust has long settled on the site, but the litigation it spawned continues in Manhattan courtrooms. The various legal fights bring together a motley cast of characters and a bizarre confluence of questions, including these: When, if ever, does a doorknob or a plumbing fixture qualify as art? How does the city divvy up its emergency-demolition contracts? And is the city giving nonprofit status to a cult that uses hypnotized teens as slave labor to enrich the cult's founder, a Palm Beach millionaire with five airplanes?

Evan Blum was one of the pioneers in the architectural-salvage business. The Long Island native started Irreplaceable Artifacts in the 1970's, and has since been profiled in Esquire , Smithsonian magazine and The New York Times . He purchased most of the items in his warehouse from wrecking crews in the New York area.

Mr. Blum and his father, Walter Blum, were in the process of renovating their building to make a restaurant on the premises when a wall started caving in. City inspectors arrived and, fearing a disaster-so much so that the F train underneath was shut down and traffic on Houston diverted-asked for and won an emergency-demolition order.

The building was roped off with police tape, and Mr. Blum was allowed just 10 minutes to go inside and bring out what he could carry. He rescued one box of business documents; he left behind his two cats and what he says were millions of dollars' worth of architectural salvage items. One of the cats survived; the other presumably perished along with most of Mr. Blum's salvaged treasures.

Most … but not all.

During his frantic 10 minutes inside before the wrecking ball landed, Mr. Blum was surprised to notice certain large items already missing from the premises. He didn't have time to look for them or verify his suspicion: The building was demolished within 24 hours.

A month later, Mr. Blum visited the Scranton, Penn., warehouse of his main competitor in the architectural salvage business, Olde Good Things. There, Mr. Blum found some of his missing salvage objects, including 20 seven-foot-high embossed-brass elevator doors, a 10-foot-wide zinc frieze and two brass entry doors from the old Paramount Theater.

Olde Good Things is a phenomenally successful salvage and antiques concern operated by the Church of Bible Understanding, a religious organization that has been called a cult by former members. COBU was founded in the 1970's by a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned Jesus freak named Stewart Traill. Mr. Traill now lives a decidedly non-ascetic life in Palm Beach, where he allegedly owns five airplanes. His cult continues to recruit mostly troubled teens from inner-city areas in Philadelphia, and, according to Mr. Blum's lawyers, these teens provide Mr. Traill with the free labor that makes his business a success.

Mr. Blum filed a police report in Scranton, estimating the value of the goods at over $200,000 and charging grand larceny. Eventually, a New York City building official pleaded guilty to helping divert the items onto the Olde Good Things trucks.

Adding insult to injury, Mr. Blum and his father had been charged with felonies for allowing their building to become a hazard. A jury cleared them of recklessly endangering lives and lying in paperwork about the extent of the renovations that were under way at the time of the July 2000 collapse. They were convicted of lesser charges of recklessly creating a serious risk of injury to their employees and neighbors.

After his building was demolished, Mr. Blum filed his own lawsuit against the city in October 2001, asking $20 million in damages and alleging that the city ordered the emergency demolition "without justification, without an opportunity for [Mr. Blum] to be heard, without procedures for the preservation of evidence and with intentional malice."

Mr. Blum's lawyer, Ray Dowd of Dowd & Marotta, said the city orders around a dozen emergency demolitions every month and that a small club of favored contractors is paid $300,000 to $400,000 for each one, a practice he said explained some of the "large political contributions" to various political figures. Mr. Dowd said the city is required to give owners hearings before demolitions, but that most owners, like Mr. Blum, rarely get their day in court before the wrecking ball strikes.

Mr. Blum's lawsuit is still pending.

A year after Mr. Blum filed suit against the city, a New York Consumer Affairs inspector walked into his other place of business, Demolition Depot on 125th Street in Harlem, and, pretending to be a consumer, innocently inquired about a non-working stand-up hand-dryer. Told she could have the item, the inspector revealed her identity and cited Mr. Blum for operating as a dealer in secondhand goods without a city license.

Mr. Blum was immediately suspicious about why the inspector visited his store in the first place. His lawyers filed a FOIA motion to find out exactly what inspired the undercover inspection of Demolition Depot on that day. They have received nothing. "I think it was the city's response to his lawsuit," says Mr. Dowd.

Mr. Blum doesn't want to file for a secondhand-dealer license. He says such a filing would require him to perform a Herculean feat of bureaucratic documentation on each and every item in his vast and dusty warehouse.

Mr. Blum is also reluctant to file for a license because his conviction in the downtown building collapse could be reason for the city to deny the license.

But his main argument against licensing, which continues to this day, is that he is not selling secondhand goods but art objects. Mr. Blum claims that he is not just a secondhand-goods dealer, but a purveyor of "sculpture" to Hollywood and some of the city's finest homes.

Among the scores of fabulous who have purchased brass friezes, gargoyles and other monumental tchotchkes from Mr. Blum are Pierre Cardin, Jane Pauley, the Banana Republic stores, Keith McNally, downtown restaurant Il Buco, Woody Allen and Kevin Costner.

With a client list like that, Mr. Blum differentiates himself from other "dealers in secondhand goods" such as one finds behind tables at the Sixth Avenue flea markets. Mr. Blum contends his things are art, worthy of First Amendment protection and by no means liable to city regulation, as are other thrift and antique stores.

In the first hearing on the licensing, the following exchange between Mr. Blum's lawyers and the city's licensing inspector set the tone.

Ray Dowd (Mr. Blum's lawyer): "Did you see objects of art on the premises?"

Administrative law judge Kirk Miller: "Do you understand what he means by 'objects of art'?"

Inspector Vickie Cabble: "Such as this? The, the …. "

Judge Miller: "Why don't we define our terms here?"

Mr. Dowd: "If you went to Home Depot, would you see gates like that?"

During the same hearing, Mr. Blum's wife Leslie, an architect, testified as to how she and her husband transform salvaged objects-functional tools like radiator grills-into works of art.

"We take a look at it and say, 'This is a lovely piece of ornamental grillwork. People don't need grills like this anymore; what can we do with them?' … [A]nd we try to see, in this case, the idea of passing light through it, putting a diffuser behind it and having light come through … because you get to set the tracery of the metalwork."

The Blums have published a lavishly photographed coffee-table book on the many decorative uses for architectural-salvage pieces.

Mr. Blum argued through his lawyers that with his decorative imagination, he has a "transformative" effect on everyday old things like doorknobs, bathtubs and grillwork. In fact, Mr. Blum also sends the original artifacts overseas to craftsmen in Belgium who mold and cast from the originals, making new things that look old, which are then sold to New York's high-end decorators.

The city's response is that in no way are doorknobs and plumbing fixtures-no matter how old or beautiful, and no matter whether they've been transformed into decorative objects-worthy of First Amendment protection against city licensing requirements.

"To suggest that the sale of a plumbing fixture or doorknob, which would otherwise be unprotected by the First Amendment, becomes so protected with the addition of decoration (which in and of itself is not expressive) and thus becomes 'sculpture' is contrary to both common sense and the inherent purpose of the First Amendment," the city's lawyers wrote in a recent brief.

"In any event the analysis … is completely irrelevant to the instant proceeding where [Mr. Blum] offers for sale items previously sold, including doorknobs, mirrors, light fixtures, plumbing fixtures and bathtubs. Clearly such items are not entitled to First Amendment protection regardless of any efforts on behalf of petitioner to restore or refurbish such items."

A judge is expected to rule within a matter of days on the licensing issue, putting to rest-for the moment at least-the question of whether radiator grills can morph into high art. If Mr. Blum is forced to file for a license and is denied one, he's certain to file another lawsuit. As for the $20 million lawsuit Mr. Blum filed against the city in October 2001, it's unlikely to be resolved for years.

The justices seemed so receptive to arguments that Mr. Ratner and his lawyers have been making for nearly two years that Mr. Ratner left the courtroom saying, "I am really upbeat, really optimistic. The government's argument to close the courthouse door was skeptically received." For Mr. Ratner, the mere receptiveness of the justices on the nation's highest court is a personal vindication. Since taking the first Gitmo case back in late 2001, he's been besieged with e-mailed vitriol. He's saved these mementos of lawyering in interesting times. Here's a sample:

"Mr. Ratner-just caught you on MSNBC. You define the term 'a pencil-necked liberal geek.'"

"If you were my neighbor I'd kick your ass nonstop …. If you love Iraqis so much why don't you pack up your little jew outfit and move there permanently."

"You should be charged with treason against this country and thrown in jail for the rest of your life."

Mr. Ratner began attracting the abuse of his fellow citizens when he decided, with the W.T.C. ruins still smoking, to file habeas corpus petitions for some of the "enemy combatants" imprisoned at Guantánamo Naval Base-when, he points out, no one else would take them on as clients.

A Columbia Law grad who heads the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights, Mr. Ratner is no stranger to representing non-Americans. He helped win the release of the Haitian refugees locked up in the Gitmo AIDS camps in the 1980's, and has also worked on behalf of brutalized Nicaraguans. Under his direction, the center filed suit against the NYPD on behalf of Amadou Diallo, the African immigrant shot to death in a police blunder in 1999.

He was, however, a bit leery of the men in Gitmo. He'd never worked for a group as universally loathed as the Gitmo detainees. Mr. Ratner's first Guantánamo client, David Hicks, an Australian high-school dropout who found his calling as a Taliban warrior, was no Diallo. Mr. Ratner has yet to meet Mr. Hicks, but he's familiar with his clients' views. In one letter home from Afghanistan, Hicks wrote about "Washington-Jewish domination" and the "Jewish propaganda war machine."

Mr. Ratner was downtown, jogging along the Hudson on Sept. 11, 2001. One of his kids' soccer coaches was killed in the World Trade Center that morning. Like all New Yorkers, he went through a period of grief and shocked mourning. Quite soon, however, the C.C.R.-founded in 1966 by civil-rights lawyers including William Kunstler-became involved in trying to help New York–area Muslim immigrants who were being rounded up willy-nilly by immigration officials in the weeks following the attacks.

Two months after the attacks-Nov. 13, 2001-to be precise, Mr. Ratner turned on the radio to hear that the President had ordered unlimited detention and military tribunals for a certain class of noncitizens.

"You wake up one morning and there's a military order coming out of the President," he said. "Here we have this guy, George Bush, who I consider to be a boob, acting as Commander in Chief, not just in Afghanistan, but with domestic detentions. It came as a total shock. No precedent for it. The parallel would be the Japanese camps, and the Civil War when Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus. The idea that under his order you could simply detain people, and the President would designate who should be detained, was shocking. It goes back to 1215, the Magna Carta. At that point, I decided we ought to represent people before the tribunal."

Mr. Ratner's first hurdle was to find a client. Since the men being transported to Guantánamo weren't allowed to contact their families, let alone call their lawyers, this took some doing. Eventually, the C.C.R. filed suit on behalf of Mr. Hicks and a pair of young Muslim British citizens.

In those first months, no other organizations or law firms jumped to represent the detainees, despite the general alarm among civil-rights lawyers. Mr. Ratner quickly realized the unpopularity of the Gitmo cause. After he appeared on various television shows, the abusive mail and e-mail was addressed to him personally.

"We put together a group of death-penalty lawyers first, because they were the only people I could get to work with us. They were used to representing utterly unpopular clients in terrible situations.

"The center was not used to it. We were used to representing people with whom we were generally in agreement. So this created a bit of tension within the center. Even I asked myself, 'Am I going to represent someone who actually bombed the World Trade Center?' Some people were saying, 'Should we be doing this?' But by that time, we already had the roundups, the Patriot Act and then this. It just looked to me like the civil-liberties situation was going to get pretty bad out there, and not just for noncitizens."

Eventually, the C.C.R. was joined by other firms and associations. The Kuwaiti government hired the white-shoe firm Sherman and Sterling to represent the Kuwaiti nationals in Camp X-Ray. Federal courts at the lower and appeals level dismissed the case, agreeing with the government that the Guantánamo noncitizen detainees had no recourse in the American court system.

Then last November, in an unexpected move, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Dozens of organizations and individuals-including retired military officers and the ACLU-filed amicus briefs in support of the C.C.R.'s position.

The Supreme Court surprised both sides by taking the case-and according to Mr. Ratner, the government appears to have changed its course in response. Since the day in November when the court announced that it would hear the case, 58 men have been transferred (making a total of 134 detainees transferred either for release or detention in their native countries). In March, Mr. Rumsfeld announced that the detainees would now be granted annual reviews of their status. Officials recently allowed The New York Times to photograph the inside of the cells, complete with chess boards and Korans suspended in special hangers.

More interestingly, the government released two of the four plaintiffs in the C.C.R.'s original case (Mr. Hicks was transferred to await a tribunal). Some observers suspect this was an effort to moot the case. To guard against that possibility, the C.C.R. added to the Supreme Court filing five more detainees three weeks before the hearing.

Mr. Ratner went to England in March and met his British clients for the first time. "Their story is that they were over there [in Afghanistan] going to a wedding and they got scooped up. These guys were as far from being terrorists as my own kids."

Mr. Ratner said the young men described a kind of psychological torture in which letters from family members were waved before them during interrogations as bait. They also said they had been offered housing and money in exchange for agreeing to become "listening posts" or informants for the U.S.

The fact that Guantánamo has become an international symbol of American jack-booted-ness is all the more reason for the government to try to get the place more in line with the rule of law, according to Mr. Ratner. Even Mr. Hicks' government-appointed military lawyer, Maj. Michael Mori, joined a press conference in Britain last month and called the tribunals a "complete throwback to the military commissions of the 1940's." While in England, Mr. Ratner was fêted along with other co-consuls by a Tory member of Parliament and invited to speak at an Oxford forum organized by the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer.

"One thing that came out at that forum is that Guantánamo has become iconic in the Muslim world for a lot that's wrong in the U.S.," Mr. Ratner said. "It is now a place where people can dump a lot of anti-Americanism. That picture with a man kneeling on the ground in a red jumpsuit and a Marine with a crewcut standing over him-that is emblematic of how Muslims in certain parts of the world feel they have been treated by the U.S."

A spokesman for the Defense Department, J.A.G. attorney Major John Smith, said the recent releases from Guantánamo were not related to the Supreme Court taking the case, nor were they part of a charm offensive. In its brief before the Supreme Court, the government has argued that there was precedent for keeping the detainees out of U.S. jurisdiction, citing a 1950 case brought by some German P.O.W.'s caught in China at the end of World War II. The Supreme Court refused to take jurisdiction then.

"International law allows you to hold people until the end of conflict," Major Smith said. "The U.S. government has said we don't want to hold people longer than necessary, and if they don't have valuable intelligence or have not done something." He said the recent releases "really are just about us continuing on with our policy."

Beyond the fact that Guantánamo has been a P.R. disaster for the United States, Mr. Ratner said he's concerned about the long-term effects on American law, especially if the Supreme Court upholds the government. "I am afraid that the assertion of executive authority is so great here that it has actually changed the way the modern world or the post-Enlightenment world is going to look-which is to say, it's going back to medieval times."

Solicitor General Ted Olson-whose wife Barbara died in one of the 9/11 planes-represented the administration, opening his argument with a reference to the war on terror.

Mr. Ratner asked retired federal Judge John Gibbons of the Third Circuit to make the C.C.R.'s argument. His choice of the soft-spoken Republican was no accident. He wanted to drive home to the justices that-contrary to popular belief-suspension of habeas corpus by executive order disturbs rock-ribbed conservatives as well as pencil-necked liberal geeks.

I've always been rather stunned by the venom this woman provoked in otherwise mild-mannered people-men and women who, often enough, knew more than a little about thread counts and picking wall-paint colors.

Martha's brand of gracious living was an obvious fake, impossible to realize, as all ideals are unreachable. For some mystifying reason, though, the pretense enraged a lot of people. Do we despise Michelangelo for creating a figure of the human male that no heterosexual middle-aged husband can match?

She lied. And we Americans are an honest lot. Just ask a certain breezy, arrogant ex-President.

Like the rest of us, Martha told white lies all the time-"Ummm, delicious!" She built an empire on it, but she's not going to jail for weaving the benign fiction about the possibility of gracious living that made certain people feel rage at what they couldn't have-when even Martha didn't really have it herself.

No, Martha told the kind of lie that counts as punishable in this country: She lied to the feds.

She was brought down on something known in legal lingo as "1001," for statute 1001 of the federal code, which makes it a punishable offense to lie to a federal agent. 1001 lies are different than, say, perjury (the kind of lies Bill Clinton told) because 1001 liars aren't under oath. They're just sitting in a room having coffee with federal agents of any stripe-could be I.R.S., D.E.A. or F.B.I.

According to Washington, D.C., white-collar criminal-defense lawyer William Jeffress, 1001 was born in the McCarthy era, to ensure that people didn't lie when asked if they were communists on attestation forms required of federal employees. Over the years, it's been applied ever more widely.

Section 1001 reaches a wide range of offenses, most of which really are offenses, such as lying on applications for Social Security benefits, Mr. Jeffress said. "The controversial use is when it is applied to lying to the I.R.S., D.E.A., C.I.A. and other agents."

Until very recently, the 1001 statute was interpreted as extending to lies to agents in criminal investigations. "There was a doctrine developed by the courts called the 'exculpatory no' doctrine," Mr. Jeffress said. "When a government agent asked you, 'Did you commit a crime?' and you denied it, that was not permitted to be the basis of the 1001."

Five years ago, the Supreme Court threw out the "exculpatory no," closing that exception to the rule.

Since then, Mr. Jeffress said, more people have been nailed for lying when the underlying offense isn't charged or can't be proved. One of his clients, a former insurance commissioner of the state of Louisiana, was acquitted on all corruption charges but convicted on 1001 and spent six months in jail.

"There have been other cases in which people were acquitted of the misconduct, but convicted of 1001 or perjury," he said. "It happens more times than I can count."

Mr. Jeffress, being a defense attorney, doesn't think much of this developing application of the statute. "The U.S. is one of the few civilized countries to make lying to a policeman a crime," he said.

The gallery of gloating Martha-loathers have pointed out relentlessly that her lie to the cops was just a very ill-advised manifestation of a lifetime habit of embellishing and fibbing-a hallmark of her personal style, not just her brand.

America's growing obsession with truth-telling is at odds with the facts on the ground. Studies have consistently shown that we're quite a lyin' nation. University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman conducted a study on lying, in which he put people in a room with a stranger and asked them to describe themselves for 10 minutes. Then the subjects were asked to watch a videotape of their encounter and identify each time they said something inaccurate. Sixty percent of the participants had said at least one untrue thing, and the average participant had lied at least three times.

Mr. Feldman also found that men and women lied at the same rate, but with slight differences in the kind of lies. Women were more likely to lie to make the other person feel better about him- or herself, and men tended to lie to make themselves look better.

This would seem to indicate that Martha was behaving in a manly fashion when she told her 1001 lie.

"It seems to be a strange law," said Charles Ford, University of Alabama psychologist and author of Lies! Lies! Lies! The Psychology of Deceit . Mr. Ford has studied lying for 40 years and believes it's a fundamental part of the social fabric. In other words, people are lying all the time.

"Most of the lies we tell are not terribly malignant," Mr. Ford said. "They serve one of two purposes. They serve to make someone else feel better: 'My, what a pretty frock you are wearing!'-but even you think it's from Goodwill. Or they make you feel more important: 'I was talking to a reporter from The New York Times !' So whatever it is that makes one feel more admirable, powerful people tend to add a little on. Lying is a lubricant of polite society."

No one knew that better than Martha Stewart, self-made expert in the edible and sensory fabrications that make up gracious living.

Robert Lawry is the director of the Center for Professional Ethics at Case Western Reserve University. He knows the statistics that show most people tell a certain benign kind of lie on a daily basis. He doesn't put Martha Stewart's lying in that category, though.

"Everyone can figure out the reasoning behind having a statute like [1001]," he said. "Investigators are at a real disadvantage if you can lie to them and get away with it. Now, is it worth it to pursue someone for lying? This is a minor crime. So you are going to pursue it when you think something else is at stake. Maybe you want to muscle them into giving up someone else. Everybody assumes, in Martha Stewart's case, it's an example-a deterrent."

Even if the 1001 hadn't been applied, Martha Stewart was going down.

I base this on my own admittedly minimal brush with Ms. Stewart's "real" persona. Back in 1992, my friend, photographer Gwendolen Cates, and I had wedged ourselves into the V.I.P. dais at the MTV ball at Bill Clinton's first inauguration down in Washington. In this perfumed circle of hell, the fabulous were packed in like sardines, all oblivious to the fact that the peon floor below was actually friendly, uncrowded and much more comfortable.

On this dais, we were shoulder to shoulder with more famous people than you could pack into a camera spray of the Oscars' red carpet. We couldn't move without rubbing butts with Sigourney Weaver or smelling Robert Patrick's minty breath. Ms. Cates had recently photographed the pundit John McLaughlin, and he was suddenly nearby, unable to resist laying a paw on her young shoulder and rekindling their acquaintance.

That glittering evening, the septuagenarian stud was arm candy for none other than Martha herself, regal in a silvery chocolate gown. Ms. Cates-addled by celebrity overload and momentarily losing her keen photographer's eye for ID'ing the famous-turned to Martha and, holding out her hand, said, "I'm Gwendolen Cates," leaving the kind of pause that invites the shake-ee to identify herself in kind. Martha didn't do that, and instead uttered a phrase that until then I had assumed belonged only among the urban legends of fame.

"Don't you know who I am?" said the queen of thread counts and cupcakes to my friend. Before you could say "Did she really say that?", she vanished into the crush of celebrity flesh.

Oh, Martha, we hardly knew ye then-but do we ever now!

That brush with the real Martha notwithstanding, I enjoyed her diary in grocery-store lines and sometimes even bought the magazine. Her little pear tart with cream-cheese crust is a mainstay in my repertoire.

String me up, but I still think Martha Stewart is a national treasure.

I don't know a thing about keeping my clothes moth-free, I was over 30 before I knew which fork to use, and I learned just this weekend what a "trivet" is. I don't know how to match paint and drapes, and I would be hard-pressed to tell the difference between Art Deco and Bakelite. Granted, I've not made much of an effort this way. I usually gravitate toward company where the conversation is more interesting than the furniture.

Martha's information was thus all the more critical to me, and her demise is that much more disappointing. She knew stuff Mom never told me about gracious living. Who's going to tell me how to arrange a vase now?

For closet-and real-homemakers, Martha Stewart's recipes and home-improvement tips were the only truth that mattered. For that reason, we hope the penalty is not too harsh and that she comes home soon.

Mr. Neufeld, a nice boy from Brooklyn who comes from a family with a strong tradition of activism, from Mississippi to the S.D.S., has been back from L.A. for a long time. He's now using DNA for social justice, applying it to free the demonstrably innocent-not the probably guilty. As co-director of the Innocence Project, a New York–based clinic that uses law students and DNA evidence to overturn convictions, Mr. Neufeld, Mr. Scheck and the students at Benjamin Cardozo Law School have walked more than half of the 142 wrongly convicted souls in the country from their cells (13 of whom were on death row) into the sunlight.

Since his nine months of hyper-fame back in 1995, Mr. Neufeld has shaved the 70's mustache, and his hair is probably a little more gray. On Feb. 26, in his downtown office, furnished with Mission chairs and Indian rugs, he was more casual in jeans and a denim shirt than he has been before Judge Ito's courtroom cameras. He's had time to reflect, he said, and he believes he's the only lawyer on the old O.J. team who would not take the case if he could do it all over.

Is that because he feels a twinge of remorse for helping return to the golf courses of America a man most Caucasians believe to be a double knife-murderer? Of course not.

Actually, he said, what he regrets most about O.J. is his own lost faith in American journalism.

"I grew up believing there was no greater profession with more integrity than the press. The reporters who went overseas to unmask the evil of the war in Southeast Asia, they were my heroes. In L.A., reporters from The New York Times were getting tips from The National Enquirer ! At one point, I had a kidney stone. I am lying in the hotel waiting for the ambulance to arrive, and the phone rings and I pick it up, thinking it's my doctor. It's a reporter from The Times , and I say, 'I can't talk to you-I'm waiting for an ambulance to come get me.' And he says, 'I only have a few questions about something that happened in the courtroom today involving personalities.' This was so offensive! To see great journalists reduced to that kind of pandering and crap led me to lose all respect for the fourth estate. And to have that bubble burst is not something I would choose to do."

He said he now refuses to go on television to pontificate about any case in which he's not personally involved. You won't see him chatting with Greta on Fox about Michael Jackson, for example. "For so many of my colleagues, the microphone has become a sex object. I think the coverage of the criminal-justice system is so offensive."

Like the other O.J. lawyers, Mr. Neufeld has had to live with his share of abuse. He said he's heard that he and Mr. Scheck were dartboard targets in some police precincts. His own conflicted feelings about the case are evident in his discreet placement of a framed USA Today cover story: "Defense Attacks Evidence" reads the cover copy, above a photograph of O.J. and Mr. Neufeld together at the defense table. The picture leans against a wall behind a bookshelf, visible from Mr. Neufeld's desk but not from the rest of the room.

Pressed, he concedes that O.J. was pretty good for business, though.

Besides the Innocence Project, Mr. Neufeld-again with Mr. Scheck-has his own civil-rights firm. Among its successes has been getting the New Jersey authorities to admit that their cops practiced racial profiling on state roads, and forcing the police union in New York to pay up and change its rules in the wake of the Abner Louima torture case. He says the civil-rights practice probably gets more cases thanks to O.J., and the blanket TV coverage of the case certainly induced more prisoners to contact the Innocence Project.

Over lunch at the Socrates Grill beneath his law office (the last Greek diner with a Tribeca lease, he guessed), he was congratulating himself for forcing prosecutors in Virginia to release documents showing exactly how they convicted the wrong man in a case the Innocence Project recently overturned. The defendant, Earl Washington, was mentally retarded, spent 17 years in prison, and had at one point come within seven days of execution before the team from New York forced a DNA testing.

"The prosecutors in 'Culpeppah' County didn't want the public to see what kind of bile and pus sent this guy to jail," Mr. Neufeld said. He took a sip of his coffee malted, visibly gloating. "See, Texas is clowns and cowboys, but Virginia is pinstripe suits. That's why Ashcroft moves all the federal death-penalty cases to Virginia."

The Innocence Project's record of overturned convictions is now running at 50 percent, a figure that has surprised even the founder, and which has provoked the Project to expand (spin-off Innocence Projects are now being opened in law schools around the country) and get involved in policy reform.

Mr. Neufeld said the numbers suggest that many more innocent people are in jail. The Project has thousands of letters from prisoners backlogged, because there are only 20 law students in any given year to do the work. Of the cases they actually examine, 70 percent are excluded up front because critical biological evidence is lost or destroyed. Of the 30 percent that are left, DNA testing initiated by the Innocence Project has exonerated half.

"We know from those numbers that the real number of people in prison who could be helped by DNA is much, much greater," he said. "And we also know the causes of those wrongful convictions also present themselves in all manner of cases where there is no DNA."

Mr. Neufeld admits that the emotional high of walking innocent people out of jail was the original impetus for the Innocence Project. Now, though, he said, the work goes beyond the question of individual guilt or innocence.

"There are many, many thousands of factually innocent people languishing in prison for whom nothing can be done, and there are probably dozens on death row for whom nothing can be done. That will continue to go on unless we take advantage of this learning moment. If we don't learn from these DNA exonerations now, we are doomed to commit these same screw-ups for generations to come."

Mr. Neufeld calls the Innocence Project "a civil-rights movement" aimed at changing the face of criminal justice. In recent years, the Project-which is classified tax-exempt and funded by foundations and private donations-has consulted with various criminologists, sociologists and other experts around the nation, looking for reforms. There are hundreds of options, but the three key changes are simple, he says.

Misidentification is the most common reason for false convictions, Mr. Neufeld said. That problem can be eased with a simple fix. Most identifications in the nation are made using the line-up or the so-called "six-pack" photo array. A victim looks at faces and selects the perpetrator from a group. In fact, according to Mr. Neufeld, often what happens is that victims compare the faces and pick the one that looks most like the guilty person. If law-enforcement officials would show them one face or one person at a time, that option would be eliminated.

False confessions are the second most common reason for wrongful convictions. In 142 DNA exonerations, 30 of the defendants gave prosecutors detailed confessions, apparently without coercion. Mr. Neufeld said the psychology behind these confessions is not understood, but that to avoid them a simple police procedure must be put in place: Interrogations should be videotaped from beginning to end, not just at the point of confession. Fully videotaped interrogations will allow judges to see whether police "fed" bits of crucial information to the arrested persons.

These two reforms have been enacted in 20 jurisdictions around the country, including the entire state of New Jersey. New York City police, however, have refused.

"We met with Ray Kelly and presented him with compelling data. Unfortunately, teaching old dogs new tricks is too much a part of policing in this country. Commissioner Kelly is, I think, a very bright guy and wants to do the right thing, but it's hard. He has become the police commissioner of only two things: fighting terror and reducing overtime. As a result, he has not been that proactive in implementing these reforms."

NYPD Deputy Chief Michael Collins, a spokesman for Commissioner Raymond Kell, said the NYPD is "looking" at both ID and videotape reforms, but is unlikely to implement them anytime soon. Changing the photo and lineup methods isn't a proven fix for misidentifications, he said. "It is the belief of many other law-enforcement agencies that have looked at this that it would have no impact; it is just another way of doing things." In fact, the group lineups in New York are currently required by the district attorney's office.

Mr. Kelly believes that videotaping interrogations might be useful, but would be hard to implement. "We had over 350,000 arrests last year, and it would be logistically difficult to comply with that suggestion," Mr. Collins said. "I am sure those jurisdictions that have implemented it do not do the amount of work that we do. But we are looking into it also."

Mr. Neufeld said the third most needed reform is stringent regulation of crime labs around the country. "Most of forensic science is junk. It never went through rigorous validation." Currently, crime labs are regulated by a forensic-science association rather than a disinterested watchdog like the government. Mr. Collins, on behalf of Mr. Kelly, denied that the NYPD loses or mishandles biological evidence. "We don't even keep biological evidence. We recover it and send it to the medical examiner for analysis," he said.

Mr. Neufeld well knows that a lack of rigor in that area can help the defense, as well as the prosecution. He and Mr. Scheck built their early careers on exposing the shoddy science, the dirty slides, the lost chains of custody.

It is, after all, what acquitted his most famous client.

Mr. Neufeld didn't set out to become a DNA expert. He graduated from West Hempstead High School on Long Island after nearly failing 10th-grade chemistry and never took another science class in his life, focusing instead on history and politics. He and Mr. Scheck got into biological evidence in the 1980's, when they were working as legal-defense-fund lawyers in the Bronx. In his own first foray into the area, Mr. Neufeld was a public defender and hired five experts to refute some biological evidence. That tactic led to a rule being put in place at the public defenders' office limiting the amount of money that lawyers could spend on expert witnesses.

Their first DNA case came later. "Scheck was teaching, and I was doing some cases involving not just forensic science, but also behavioral science." (Mr. Neufeld was the first lawyer in New York to successfully apply the battered-woman syndrome.) "Legal Aid asked Barry and me to look at a case on appeal where they thought the guy was innocent. We reopened the investigation and researched a new technology in England called DNA to see if we could do it. We couldn't, because they had lost the evidence."

Soon, prosecutors began using the technology more often, and Mr. Neufeld and Mr. Scheck began using scientific experts to challenge DNA admissibility. "We realized, 'Wait, they never did a study to see whether [DNA technology] worked as well on crime-scene evidence as it did in the lab.'"

The two lawyers brought the first successful challenge in a case in the Bronx. The rest is history. "That gave us a certain notoriety in the field. No one was doing DNA. We knew not only the good things about it, but the problems."

The double-edged sword of biological evidence in criminal justice remains Mr. Neufeld's primary concern. "If there is a silver lining in the Simpson case, it was a wakeup call for the police crime labs across the nation. There is no question that the crime lab in L.A. was a sewer. In the aftermath of Simpson, the Department of Justice published a book about what every crime lab should know. It read like a cross-examination of ours in the Simpson case. All the stuff that Barry and I brought out that they didn't do, they were now telling people they had to do. So [Simpson] was a watershed event in forensic science in this country, and that's a good legacy."

Besides following microscopic blood and semen trails, Mr. Neufeld's great passion is movies. He tried filmmaking, working with Terrence Malick on Days of Heaven , and he has written a few screenplays, one of which, about a girl coming of age "without sex, drugs or rock 'n' roll," was produced with Mary Stuart Masterson starring, but went straight to video.

Mr. Neufeld-whose wife, Adele Bernhard, is also a lawyer with a social-justice bent (she heads the legal-aid clinic at Pace Law School)-said he might take her to see The Passion of the Christ , merely out of curiosity. He doesn't want to support the "reactionary" Mel Gibson, though, so he'll be buying a ticket to another movie at a multiplex, and then sneaking in.

"That's what I do when I want to see reactionary movies. Please print that so other people will try it."

His spic-and-span corner office on Park Avenue is across from the Satellite Air Terminal-convenient for serving subpoenas-and doubles as a giant display case for pictures of four healthy little kids. He wears a black cable-knit vest and white oxford shirt and, fighting off a cold, his eyes are more basset hound than Top Gun . Look closely at the walls, though. Model airplanes and helicopters, an American Airlines cork coaster and a thick flight-security manual share shelf space with videotaped testimony identified by the flight numbers of the doomed jets involved, and a book whose spine reads Aviation Insecurity .

Mr. Alexander's phone rings-and rings again and again and again. On the line are federal negotiators for the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, trying to work out the fine points of millions of dollars in payouts. As he chats amiably, there's the distinct but invisible presence of dollars billowing through the air like the bits of paper over New York after Sept. 11.

This is his job: to put a dollar value on each of the dead and find a culpable party to pay it. In the 9/11 case, there are almost as many of the former as the latter. Mr. Alexander, 40, is a partner in the law firm of Kreindler and Kreindler. For the last half century, the firm has filed suit on behalf of plaintiffs in nearly every single major crash around the world, from Sioux Falls to Lockerbie to Guam and the South China Sea. The list includes Egyptair, Valujet, Pan Am, T.W.A., Swissair, various military plane crashes, and accidents involving commuter puddle-jumpers and private planes.

The Kreindler firm's reputation as the plane-crash firm dates back to the 1950's, when a DC-6 flew into an orphanage in New Jersey. Lee Kreindler heard about it, and "it pulled at his heartstrings," said Mr. Alexander. The Harvard Law School grad took some airplane-maintenance courses and prosecuted the case. Kreindler later literally wrote the book on air-crash litigation, a three-volume treatise called Aviation Accident Law . In his obituary last year, The New York Times credited him with bringing his firm to a level of "enormous technical sophistication" in the field. That necessary sophistication "may explain why a relatively small number of law firms undertook air disaster work," according to the obituary.

Fifteen years after he flew airplanes and helicopters as an Army captain at the Pentagon's airport, Brian Alexander is no longer buzz-cut and spit-shined, but he retains the no-bullshit soldier's speaking manner. "One thing you always know: It is never the innocent passenger sitting in 9-B trying to get home to his wife and kids' fault. Never. We take every case with that predicate. We know that he didn't have anything to do with that crash."

Mr. Alexander was practically conceived on the tarmac. His parents met at J.F.K., where his dad was a flight-traffic controller and his mother worked for American Airlines. Born in Queens, reared on Long Island, he went to high school at Donald Trump's alma mater, the New York Military Academy. After West Point and a stint in the Army, he went to law school.

Mr. Alexander insists that his firm does not ambulance-chase air disasters. "We do not solicit at all. We don't advertise. Other lawyers usually are the source. It's much more challenging in this day and age because, frankly, this is the tough part of being a plaintiff lawyer. Most of my brethren on the plaintiff side of things are not guys that I'm inviting over to the house for dinner."

Mr. Alexander argues that Kreindler's lawsuits have made aviation safer. They've also pushed airlines deeper into the red: The firm was on the forefront of the lawsuit that extracted record-setting sums from Pan Am and now Libya for the victims of the Lockerbie bombing. When T.W.A. 800 crashed, the National Transportation Safety Board called Kreindler, looking for a bomb expert to rule out a missile. Kreindler experts also identified a serious flaw in a widely used aviation-software program that had caused a crash in Guam. The firm gets huge payouts for clients and is paid on contingency-at a percentage that Mr. Alexander says is less than that calculated by most other plaintiff firms. "In a lot of our cases we have a number of clients, and there's an economy there that we pass onto our clients. In something like 9/11, there's a very, very small fee."

"Small" is a relative word, in air-disaster terms. The Kreindler firm led the lawsuit that forced insurers for Pan Am airlines to pay $500 million to the Lockerbie families-the largest settlement in the history of aviation tort claims. But, according to the Financial Times , that sum "pales" in comparison with the agreement that Kreindler lawyers negotiated with Libya. In that case, Kreindler represented 120 families who agreed to pay as much as a third of any settlement, plus expenses, to the lawyers. The firm made a reported $300 million in fees on a $2.7 billion settlement.

The average 9/11 payout to Mr. Alexander's clients from the Victim Compensation Fund was between $2.5 million and $3.5 million, he says. (Those numbers are significantly higher than the $1.8 million median award, according to Victim Compensation Fund statistics.) His personal best so far, he says, was a settlement of at least $25 million for an individual in another crash.

Mr. Alexander and his firm, along with other high-profile trial lawyers, initially resisted the Victim Compensation Fund, because it required victims to waive their right to sue. Mr. Alexander still contends that the rush to pass it (less than two weeks after the attacks) was a sellout to the airlines, whose lobbyists, he says, "were spinning up their need for cash before the smoke from the W.T.C. stopped billowing"-in fact, they were going broke anyway.

Charles Miller, Department of Justice spokesman for the Victim Compensation Fund, points out that the families who accepted the fund's payout could entirely avoid attorney fees: "A lot of attorneys represented on a pro bono basis …. An organization was created by the trial lawyers to work with claimants on a totally free basis."

The Kreindler firm never went along with the American Trial Lawyers Association's suggestion that lawyers give free legal advice to 9/11 victims. Instead, Lee Kreindler penned an op-ed in the New York Law Journal in August 2002 arguing that only by actually paying lawyers could the victims assure themselves of "high professional quality work."

Most of Mr. Alexander's more than 400 9/11 clients eventually took the federal payout. The deadline for making a claim with the fund passed in December 2003. About 20 refused and joined a total of 54 others in filing suit against a laundry list of defendants, including the World Trade Center's builders, architects and engineers, the Port Authority and other governmental entities, all the major airlines, and the security firms that worked for them.

"I haven't ranked them, and I generally don't rank them," Mr. Alexander said of the defendants. "We recognize there is no one thing or one person who causes the tragedy, whether it's an airplane crash or Staten Island ferry" (yet another case Kreindler expects to take on). The attack on the W.T.C. would seem to be an exception: 19 terrorists hijacked and crashed four planes. "Clearly," Mr. Alexander allowed, "they are the first domino." And yet he's already filed a suit-on behalf of the families of more than 1,000 9/11 families-against a list of foreign entities hundreds of pages long. On the home front, he believes, the blame perhaps starts in Washington, followed by dozens of potentially culpable private parties. "There are dominoes here. You can start wherever you want-start with the intelligence failures. There is no question we were asleep at the switch."

Conspicuously off the list of defendants is the U.S. government. "That really is not a viable option. As I learned in the military cases where I represented soldiers"-he sued the U.S. over the Osprey helicopter crashes in the mid-1990's-"the bottom line is, the government can be as stupid as imaginable and it's defensible under the law."

Mr. Alexander's list of viable defendants includes the Port Authority, for example, and airports in Newark, Boston and Washington, D.C., where the hijackers began their trips, then dozens of security firms, airlines, and engineering and architectural concerns. Mr. Alexander says the W.T.C. builders, engineers and Port Authority should have expected the towers were in danger from airplanes-whether crashed deliberately or otherwise. He contends the inferno that preceded the collapse of the towers was caused more by paper and plastic in the building, and failed fireproofing, than by jet fuel. "The jet fuel burned off in seconds," he argues. "As for the fireproofing, the Port Authority absolutely knew there was a failure. In the early 1990's it had all fallen off, and they brought suit: They had sued the people who had put it in. And the core of the building. Kevlar? Brick and mortar? No. Gypsum. Particle board!"

Mr. Alexander successfully defeated an effort last year by the airlines to have the lawsuit dismissed. Now he and his colleagues face a bigger hurdle put up by the government last week. Although the feds aren't defendants in the suit, they intervened to prevent the plaintiffs from examining safety-guideline documents (the Checkpoint Operations Guide) in use by the airlines before 9/11.

The government is claiming that the C.O.G. is "secret, sensitive information." Even the security clearance Mr. Alexander won by submitting to fingerprint and background checks can't get him access to a document he says was once lying around airport staff rooms all over the country. Examining the relatively mundane checklist is crucial to proving that the airlines and their security contractors failed to uphold the law requiring them to ensure passenger security. Mr. Alexander contends that the guidelines actually did not prohibit knives with blades smaller than four inches from being carried on to planes. He pulls out a ruler and measures off four inches. "If that was a knife in my hand, you would say, 'What is up with that?' This guideline is inconsistent with the specific requirement of the law imposed on air carriers, namely to keep dangerous weapons off aircraft. I am shocked that the C.O.G. did not prohibit all knives. And they had pepper spray and mace. No ambiguity there; those were restricted items. They failed in every way here. What's amazing is that these guys [the hijackers] were on watch lists. They met the criteria for the old CAPPS [the computer-assisted passenger threat ranking]; all their luggage was screened separately through the bomb detectors; some of them had ID problems. If that isn't a red flag to stop at the gate! Then, most remarkable to me, at least half of them set off the magnetometers-had to go through twice and then ended up being wanded. And they got on the planes!"

Mr. Alexander also points out that the airlines had an unofficial policy of profiling Arab men-another screening system that failed. "If you listen to the wife of the Flight 11 pilot, she testified to the 9/11 commission that the Middle East profile always sent shivers down their spine. You didn't know what they would do. All the people in the airlines knew that. You might have put two and two together that day, all the red flags. Somebody would think, 'Gee, I got four or five together on a plane.' What's the point of any of it if you are not going to connect any of the dots?"

A frequent flyer who logs 100,000 air miles annually (he prefers Continental for its newer planes), Mr. Alexander said his line of work hasn't made him reticent about flying. "I do look at the plane. My eyes are always open. Sometimes I look up and see a kid at the wheel on a puddle-jumper and get a little nervous, but I never have had occasion to get off a plane. Flying is very safe." He's more concerned about what happens on the ground. "On the security front, I am really very skeptical. I had a screener carry my computer case around the mag machine … forgot, I guess. I said to him, 'You've got to run that through.' I have these big boots-some places run them, others don't. Why? I go through with metal in my pockets-sometimes it goes off, other times not. I am always concerned at Newark when I hear the conversations [of the screeners], and they are looking at each other and not glancing at my stuff. We are not protected, and I am not personally comforted by the actions taking place so far."

Mr. Alexander firmly supports passenger profiling and data collection, even if it makes civil libertarians angry. "I support a lot of pain in that area. The traveler should be willing to put up with it. And they should fund the technology. As an American, I have absolutely no problem with it. I might be a minority amongst my brethren, but I think if you start too far on one side, you can always correct it. We are not talking about getting locked up at Gitmo here."

On the day when airplanes were weaponized, he was thinking litigation-but not about the prospect of lawsuits by thousands of victims of terrorism. "I was thinking about what a spectacularly beautiful day it was, as I flew from Newark to Dulles at 8 a.m. for a deposition with an NTSB metallurgist. I took my head out of my papers for two seconds-not even to note the towers, but to look at the sky, because I never remembered a day so beautiful in the thousands of hours I have flown up and down the East Coast." He thinks he could have walked past some of the passengers boarding the doomed Flight 77 in Dulles that morning. He picked up his rental car and drove to the deposition without turning on the radio. Word of the attacks only reached him at 10 a.m., when someone opened a door and announced it. The defense attorney, he recalls, didn't want to stop the deposition.

"I took the risk of stopping it without his consent and called New York to see what was going on. Thankfully, I had the rental car, and I drove home that night. So that was it, and I didn't think about anything to do with litigation until much later. I thought the same things everyone else thought."

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.