Stuart Chanen, by Stuart Chanen
Stuart Chanen is a business trial lawyer with Valorem Law Group.

I confess: I was one of those law school nerds who really enjoyed what he was learning, and now I am one of those lawyer nerds who actually loves being a lawyer. I love the arguing, writing, learning my clients' businesses, getting to know them, absorbing new areas of the law, picking juries, arguing (I said that already, didn't I), learning what makes an assigned judge tick, and devising creative strategies to solve problems and win cases. That's the good stuff. That makes me a happy lawyer. (No, it's not an oxymoron.)

But as happy as that stuff makes me, I have become extremely unhappy with the practice of law in the large-firm environment: Large teams of lawyers, lined up vertically in hierarchical organization charts, with ever-increasing hourly rates, pressure to meet billing targets, and the sending out of monthly bills, often devoid of logical relation to the specific results so far obtained or even to be later obtained. I watched clients, forced to settle cases, not based on the merits of their claims or defenses, but simply because they could no longer withstand the crush of the monthly fees. Nothing ever made me more frustrated than when a client abandoned a winnable case on the sole ground that the pressure of mounting fees made it more cost-effective to settle the case than to try the case to the end on its merits. (I never like letting the bad guys win.)

So great was my frustration with this structure that in 2000, after fifteen years of practice at a successful and growing law firm, I gave up my partnership to become a "One-L": a "line assistant" in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago (one of only three lawyers ever to start in that office as a line assistant over the age of 40). Few understood at the time why I would take that kind of cut in pay, but I got what I craved: lots of courtroom action. I was exhilarated working with federal agents, conducting complex investigations, trying 12 multi-defendant trials (11 to juries), and arguing eight appeals in the Seventh Circuit. My lawyerly battery was recharged, I got to do the lawyer things I loved to do (have I said "argue" yet), AND not let the bad guys win.

By 2004 I thought I was ready for large law firm life again. I came out of the U.S. Attorney's Office and plunged back into private practice at Katten Muchin, equipped with sharpened advocacy skills, criminal law experience, and my prior 15 years of managing civil cases. I enjoyed doing criminal and civil internal investigations, grand jury investigations, white collar criminal defense, and whistleblower cases. I was especially gratified representing victims of fraud. I helped a Fortune 50 company to recover some of the $4 million that had been stolen from it in an embezzlement scheme and also to cancel another $5 million in contracts to which the defendants had fraudulently committed the company. I helped a mezzanine lender recoup all of its investment (and a little more) when its partners in a joint venturer tried to hijack the joint venture to prop up another of the partners' companies and keep it out of bankruptcy. Knowing this would only work if we moved quickly, we asked that a receiver be appointed, and the Court set the matter down for hearing. When the other side demanded discovery to slow the matter down, we told the Court and kept to our word that the depositions would be done in a week. We ultimately settled for well in excess of our clients' investment and did so without taking the case to verdict.

Admittedly, my caseload was not as "entertaining" as my early years, when I literally defended the actor George Hamilton in a spokesperson liability claim (an early summary judgment motion on legal grounds got him out of the case quickly and inexpensively), and then I later successfully defended a real estate client in a defamation case brought by comedian Milton Berle, who was upset that a picture of him dressed as Carmen Miranda had been used in an advertisement. (Comedians often have such thin skins.) In addition to winning the case, we also got the last laugh a few years later when Berle's lawyer asked me to represent him in a matter because he was impressed with the way we had gotten our client dismissed.

Shortly after that, my eyes were opened to real lawyer-client collaboration in a case I led for a French medical doctor-entrepreneur whose Del Mar, California company, Humetrix, had entered into a joint venture with France's largest privately-held company, Gemplus. Later, at the key moment the joint-venture product was to be rolled out, Gemplus tried to steal Humetrix's ideas, relationships, trademarks, and work product, and literally pretended that the two had never met before (even though they had been working together for almost two years). Gemplus was confident that Humetrix did not have the financial wherewithal to weather big-time international litigation or to drag Gemplus into court in the United States. It turned out they were wrong. Humetrix hired me on a wholly contingent basis, and after depositions in France, New York, Chicago, and up and down the entire coast of California, Dr. Experton was able to do what she would likely never have been able to do paying hourly: she took her case to trial. Later, when we got a unanimous jury verdict on every count, for $17.5 million, I was gratified both that the bad guys were not able to get away with it and that large monthly fees had not stood in the way of Humetrix and Dr. Experton giving their rightful claim a chance.

The highlight of my entire legal career occurred just this year, in May 2009, when I led a team of lawyers from my former firm, in cooperation with lawyers from the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Law School, to obtain the full exoneration of Thaddeus Jiminez ("TJ"). When TJ was only 13 years old, he was wrongfully convicted and sentenced as an adult to a forty-five-year prison term for a murder he did not commit. He served sixteen years, two months, and 27 days until we were able to get the State of Illinois to agree to his release and full exoneration on May 1, 2009. I cannot adequately describe my elation the night I hugged TJ as he emerged from the Hill Correctional Center in Galesburg and how it felt to deliver him to his mother's home late that night. I truly loved being a lawyer at that moment (and did not even feel like a nerd for loving it).

In the spring of '08, my then partner (and now partner again) Nicole Auerbach announced that she was leaving Katten to start a new law firm in which four "BigLaw Refugees" were going to trade in their pinstripes to become "revolutionaries, risk-takers and entrepreneurs" and were dedicated to principles such as "collaboration," "the team," and "value billing." I also had known two of her new partners for 25 years and thought very highly of them. I checked out their website and laughed -- particularly at the cool disclaimer, which you can, if you want, see at the bottom of each page. (How often does a law firm website make you laugh? Smile, even?)

In the summer of '09, I started looking for an alternative to large law firm practice. After looking at several alternatives, Valorem was the only one that made sense for the direction I wanted to take my practice. On August 24, 2009, I joined this merry band of "revolutionaries, risk-takers, and entrepreneurs." Perhaps the best part: not a single client has yet to complain that all billing is now tied to results, not hours. That makes me a happy lawyer too.