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Law Firms

Ballard Spahr announces merger that ‘is just the tip of the next iceberg’ in Pacific Northwest

By Debra Cassens Weiss

September 10, 2024, 9:32 am CDT

Ballard Spahr is expanding into the Pacific Northwest through a merger with Lane Powell, the law firms announced Monday.

Ballard Spahr will gain offices in Anchorage, Alaska; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle through the merger, which is set to take effect Jan. 1, 2025, according to a Sept. 9 press release. The combined firm will have more than 750 lawyers in 18 U.S. offices.

“We’re bullish on the Pacific Northwest—we really see opportunities in all three cities,” Peter Michaud, the chair at Ballard Spahr, told Law.com.

He joined Ballard Spahr through its 2018 merger with Lindquist & Vennum and became the chair this year. He will also chair the newly merged firm.

Greg Walther of Emerald Search Partners, a legal staffing and recruiting company, told Bloomberg Law that the Pacific Northwest is home to major technology companies, as well as an emerging biotech industry.

The merger “is just the tip of the next iceberg,” Walther said. “I’m sure there are a lot of other Am Law 50 firms looking at merging or planting a flag here in the Pacific Northwest.”

The merged firm will be called Ballard Spahr, although in the Pacific Northwest it will use the name Ballard Spahr Lane Powell for the next few years, Michaud told Law360.

Lane Powell, founded in 1875, has nearly 180 attorneys. Ballard Spahr has more than 600 lawyers in 15 U.S. offices.

Michaud told Bloomberg Law that Ballard Spahr will keep a one-tiered partnership “for the foreseeable future,” even though Lane Powell has a nonequity partnership tier.

The issue is “something that we’ll probably tackle as a combined firm,” Michaud told Bloomberg Law. In the meantime, he said, the focus will be on helping every Lane Powell attorney understand that they are important “regardless of what their what their title is.”

Michaud also told Bloomberg Law that Ballard Spahr is considering other growth opportunities in intellectual property and in the areas of Texas and Florida.

“As the combined firm, all of us will work together to figure out what … the next move should be,” he said.

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Legal History

Was wrong person executed in death of Lindbergh baby? Ex-judge’s book and DNA quest raise issues

By Debra Cassens Weiss

March 11, 2024, 10:22 am CDT

Updated: A court case and a book by a former judge are raising questions about the guilt of German immigrant Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a man convicted and executed in the 1932 kidnapping and death of the 20-month-old son of aviator Charles A. Lindbergh.

Lawyer Kurt Perhach is asking a New Jersey appeals court to reverse a judge’s 2023 ruling that rejected his client’s bid to test saliva on stamped ransom envelopes to determine whether Hauptmann is the killer, report the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and New Jersey Monthly.

The judge had reasoned that the state’s open-records law “is not the vehicle by which a citizen can march up to a museum and demand that the custodians of historical artifacts and documents surrender the state’s treasures for analysis, alteration and destruction.”

Hauptmann’s great-great niece and her aunt have provided DNA samples that could help answer the question whether their late relative is indeed guilty.

A retired California judge, Judge Lise Pearlman, is not part of that lawsuit, but she is promoting a theory that Lindbergh is a potential suspect. She says that Lindbergh was fascinated with eugenics and had been conducting research with Dr. Alexis Carrel, a surgeon and an organ transplant pioneer.

“My theory is that the child was operated on,” Pearlman told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We think at the very least that his carotid and probably his thyroid were taken out and kept viable for 30 days. We think he died on the operating table. And I think Carrel conducted the operation with Lindbergh’s permission—and Lindbergh was likely present at the operation.”

She suggests that Carrel had operated on the toddler and removed organs to see whether they could be preserved outside the body for use in transplants. The goal may have been to help Lindbergh’s sister-in-law, who had a damaged heart valve.

An autopsy of the toddler had revealed that all his organs were missing, except for his heart and liver, according to the New York Times. And there appeared to be no blood in the woods where the body was found. Investigators had attributed the missing organs to animals feeding on the body.

Pearlman points to other clues—there appeared to be no vermin on the body, and the toddler’s face and feet may have decomposed more slowly than the rest of the body. That could mean that chemicals had been used.

Hauptmann was arrested in 1934 after he used a $10 gold certificate that was part of a ransom payment to buy gas. Hauptmann had claimed, however, that a man had asked him to hold the gold certificates before he died in Germany.

Some dispute Pearlman’s theories, including David M. Friedman, who wrote The Immortalists: Charles Lindbergh, Dr. Alexis Carrel, and Their Daring Quest to Live Forever. He called Pearlman’s ideas “malicious garbage” in an interview with the New York Times. He acknowledged, however, that he had not read Pearlman’s book.

Updated March 12 at 9:10 a.m. to report that David M. Friedman said he had not read Judge Lise Pearlman’s book.

The next time you go to a website, find the customer service tab and enter a live chatroom with an assistant tasked with answering your questions and helping you with your issues, the chances are that you’re not actually talking to a human.

Programmed to communicate as if they were living, breathing people, AI chatbots function by asking you a series of questions and providing you with your available options. They’ve become commonplace in the corporate world, allowing companies to provide 24/7 service without relying on asking people to work graveyard shifts or utilizing overseas call centers.

Lawyers, law firms and courts have even gotten into the act, using chatbots to answer legal questions, help lawyers with client intake, resolve disputes between litigants, and even help pro-se parties represent themselves in court. As a result, chatbots have emerged as a tool with the enormous potential to help bridge the access-to-justice gap.

But could they also have an enormous potential for harm? In June, a software engineer at Google made headlines when he claimed that his AI chatbot had become sentient.

Cue immediate mass panic, as people speculated whether this was the start of the coming robot uprising foreseen in movies such as the Terminator series or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Would we soon have no choice but to welcome our new robot overlords? Google pushed back and fired the engineer, saying his claims were wholly unfounded. But that’s just what you’d expect from a company that may or may not have stumbled into created the real-life version of Skynet, right?

Tom Martin, founder and CEO of LawDroid, a bot development and consulting company for the legal industry, and a 2022 ABA Journal Legal Rebel, helps lawyers and courts design chatbots. He joined the ABA Journal’s Victor Li to dispel some myths about chatbots and explain what they can and can’t do, as well as where the field of chatbots might be heading, especially in the legal field.

Want to listen on the go? Legal Rebels is available on several podcast listening services. Subscribe and never miss an episode.
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See also:

ABAJournal.com: “What you need to know about virtual and chatbot assistants for lawyers”

ABAJournal.com: “Reach new clients with chat tools for your law firm’s website”

In This Podcast:

Tom Martin

Tom Martin is the founder and CEO of LawDroid and a 2022 ABA Journal Legal Rebel. He helps lawyers and courts design chatbots. In November 2016, he started LawDroid, a bot development and consulting company for the legal industry.