This Week in Law: The Malawi Lawyer Edition

Forty dollars won’t even buy a decent shirt these days. But when two twenties are all that stand between you and an exit stamp from one of the poorest countries on Earth--and, let's say, your debit card doesn’t work at the only ATM in the airport, and your wife is a hairsbreadth from a meltdown because if you miss this flight you will be stuck for at least four more days, and you are making your fellow travelers nervous because you’ve begun to unconsciously lick your lips when they discuss money--well, it feels like it might as well be $4 million.

As you might have guessed, this is more than a hypothetical predicament. Out of cash at the end of our summer vacation to Malawi, a tiny finger-shaped country in southeast Africa, This Week in Law found ourselves turned back by customs officials who demanded an exit fee that, in our defense, we didn’t know we needed to pay.

There was no time to return to town. Tears were shed. There may have also been recriminations. Then, just as Mrs. TWIL was preparing to mug a German tourist with the hand-carved mahogany salad tongs she had bought from a roadside stand, we were saved--by a lawyer, no less. Herbert, a kindly Malawian corporate attorney from the industrial city of Blantyre (we wrote his last name in a now-missing guidebook), loaned us the money we needed to return home and resume our TWIL duties. Zikomo (thank you) Herbert!

And while we are at it, more zikomos for Ross Todd, who filled in admirably while we were away. (At least, until he selfishly left town to attend his wedding).

We can hear our editor clearing his throat. On to the best legal news of the week.

On Monday, we learned that the old Oscar mothballed in your closet is worth somewhere between $10 and $1.5 million. As you may have guessed, there is a legal dispute here, explained in this AmLaw Daily story. The descendants of Charles "Buddy" Rogers, the former husband of silent film star Mary Pickford, hope to sell her 1929 Best Actress statuette on the open market for a million dollars or more. But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (represented by Christopher Tayback of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges) says it has the first option to buy the statute, and that the price it should pay is just $10, under a rule established by the Academy in 1950. Regardless of when Pickford first received the Oscar, the Academy says, she signed away her rights to sell it when she won an honorary Oscar in 1975. A Los Angeles trial court judge has ordered a jury trial. Stay tuned.

Most people stop making news after they go to prison. Not Bill Lerach. In May, AmLaw colleague Ross Todd wrote this piece about what the fallen king of the plaintiffs bar can expect in prison (cavity searches, sure, but also 300 minutes a month in calls). In June, Lerach authored this not-quite mea culpa in Portfolio (upshot: paying plaintiffs was an industry practice).

Then, on Tuesday, our sibling publication The Recorder reported that Lerach was put in “administrative segregation”—that’s lockdown to you and me—for 23 hours a day. His offense? He allegedly offered a corrections officer use of his San Diego Chargers season tickets. Up next, an administrative hearing, which could result in Lerach being sent to a higher-security facility. He could also lose any "good time" he had accumulated toward early release.

But it’s not all bad news for Bill. Even as Lerach was sitting in solitaire, bouncing his baseball against the wall—this is how we imagine we would spend our time, at least, Steve McQueen-style—he was making money. A lot of it. On Monday Houston federal district court judge Melinda Harmon approved an award of $688 million in attorneys' fees to the plaintiffs lawyers who recovered $7.2 billion for former Enron shareholders. As lead counsel, Lerach's old firm, Couglin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins, will take home the lion's share of those fees, which also set a class action record. Lerach’s take: $50 million. (For more on a potential fee fight, read AmLaw Daily Brian Baxter's story here).

TWIL used to live with a pig. No, this is not a euphemism for a messy roommate. We lived with an honest-to-God, snorting, grunting, po bellied pig. And before you ask: It’s purely coincidental that we are also from Alabama. (Ours was a spiteful pig, but these are details better saved for another anecdote.) Anyway, as we do every morning, we scan the newswire for any swine-related legal news. On Wednesday, we discovered that PETA has asked the Department of Agriculture to investigate the circumstances of the killing of a pig in Florida. According to a press release, an attorney for Dollar General Corp. was seeking to gather evidence for a lawsuit involving a woman who fell in a Dollar General in Gainesville. A pig’s body, the PETA release says, “was repeatedly dropped on a concrete surface” in an experiment, we assume, to gauge what type of damage the carcass sustained. PETA says the experiment was “cruel and irrelevant” and that there may have been Animal Welfare Act violations in regards to the method used to euthanase the pig. That’s right, TWIL readers: The pig was killed before it was dropped on the concrete floor. Yet PETA’s beef (sorry) seems to also be with what happened to the pig after it was dead. Here’s our question: Does federal law protect dead animals?

Our colleague Vivia Chen had high hopes when she was invited to a Sheppard Mullin-sponsored event called “How not to Trip on the Catwalk” at Fashion Group International Headquarters in New York. But it turns out Chen was a victim of a marketing metaphor. As she wrote on Thursday, instead of supermodels and fashionistas, Sheppard put on a glorified CLE course (“but with duller graphics”). And don’t even get her started on the food (“cubed cheese, fruit on skewers, and suspiciously uniform squares of pate”). Chen, we should point out, scores way more invites to law firm soirees than TWIL. She is also a more discerning guest. At a Greenberg Traurig networking event in June, she critiqued the chocolate distributed to guests as “rather puny in size, like the kind you find on pillows in hotels.” But she’s not afraid to dole out the credit when due, either. A Paul, Weiss annual gay and lesbian networking party would have been worthy of (Sex and the City’s) Carrie Bradshaw, she previously reported.

Friday bonus: Did we mention we were in Africa? So, too, are a growing number of American and British lawyers, the AmLaw Daily's Zach Lowe writes. Mkono & Co., a leading firm out of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, recently signed a memorandum of understanding with Hunton & Williams,he reports. “Recent events prove there is big money to be made in Africa for dealmaking lawyers,” Lowe writes. We know a guy in Malawi.