Eight months after quitting big-firm law, Clifford Chanler is making his mark as outside counsel for environmentalists.
If the creators of Shannon’s Deal – the defunct television show about a big-firm attorney who chucks it all to champion the little guy – wanted to revive the series with a 1990’s environmentally-correct twist, they might consider the case of Clifford Chanler.
It’s a story line with sure-fire appeal to the young and distressed of the downtown legal world: 32-year-old associate sheds corporate suit and, recession be damned, establishes public interest practice from the living room of his Pacific Heights apartment. Backed by a “green team” of fresh-faced, blue-jeaned lawyers and investigators, the one-time Wall Street bond trader and securities litigator fights for truth, justice and clear and reasonable product warning labels.
Possible TV pilots aside, real life has handed the San Francisco attorney a string of successes since he struck out on his own last August and forged a relationship with the Environmental Defense Fund. Acting as chief counsel on the group’s Proposition 65 cases, Chanler has negotiated settlements with manufacturers to remove carcinogen-containing paint stripper and other tainted consumer products from California markets.
Other actions, brought under the Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act, have led to alliances with the state attorney general's office against the makers of lead-tainted tableware.
He's even been under the national media spotlight – Cable News Network came calling in response to to the paint-stripper cases.
Heady stuff, for someone who even handled an environmental case in corporate practice. “Ideally, we’d like to get recognized in the nonprofit circle as the firm that people should consider when they’re going to pursue legal action,” Chanler says. “Just as the large firms like to market themselves to large corporations, we want to market ourselves to nonprofits.”
To a large extent, Chanler has California voters to thank for the roughly 200 cases that have come his way since he left Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati eight months ago. When voters passed Prop 65 in 1986, they gave private citizens the right to bring suits against those who fail to warn consumers about products containing carcinogens and reproductive toxins listed by the state.
For the nonprofit groups that bring such suits, Prop 65 has spawned a need for outside litigators willing to handle the cases, preferably pro bono. The defense fund offers little in way of remuneration but plenty of support from a staff of scientists and experts who wrote the toxic control law.
"The modern problem [in getting outside counsel], particularly with an enforcement statute, is that big firms always find a way to say no, even if individual partners are eager to help out," says David Roe, a senior attorney with the defense fund and a Prop 65 author.
"Our successes with enforcement statutes has been with small firms that can call their own shots and aren't dependent on the traditional corporate client base," Roe says. "Cliff's really a classic example of what Prop 65 would hope to stimulate, somebody who's trying to do good work in the public interest and is able to take big risks."
Chanler won't discuss how he plans on paying his bills, but under Prop 65 he will be able to petition for attorneys' fees in successful cases. The settlements he's negotiated so far have included fees, though they aren't disclosed.
A Short Stop in Palo Alto
The defense fund's legal needs and Chanler's increasing uncomfortableness with big firm life intersected last summer. With most of the challenges to Prop 65 having run their course, the defense fund was gearing up a campaign against lead-contaminated tableware and paint strippers containing the carcinogen methylene chloride.
Chanler had met Roe in the spring of 1990 and offered his time pro bono on a methylene cloride case. Chanler had just completed work in a case in which the team he was on at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison won a $14.9 million breach-of-contract judgment for its client, a defense contractor salesman named James Hendry.
Despite satisfaction with the work Chanler had done, Brobeck wouldn't let him take the methylene chloride case, he says. "I'm not sure if it was a direct conflict or the fact that enforcing Prop 65 against corporations was something that was an inherent conflict with Brobeck's overall business strategy."
Franklin Brockway Gowdy, a Brobeck partner and litigation team head, says he doesn't remember the pro bono proposal but recalls Chanler's work. “He did very well on the Hendry case,” says Gowdy, who allowed Chanler to conduct some trial examinations. “He's smart, bright, aggressive and personable. I think he felt that it was just a better idea for him to keep moving and find a place that was absolutely suited for his temperament. I think he has found that place now, and he'll be real successful.”
Burned-out on litigation after spending most of his two years at the firm on the Hendry case, Chanler tried to secure a transfer to Brobeck's corporate department. Unsuccessful, he left for Wilson, Sonsini in the fall of 1990.
But the Palo Alto firm was just as unenthusiastic about taking on a Prop 65 case. Seven months into his new job, Chanler was called into the head litigation partner's office.
“He told me that he didn't think my heart was in my work and he expressed his opinion that he thought I'd be better off doing my own thing,” Chanler says.
“I approached David Roe the very next day. I said to him: ‘I was thinking about leaving a large law firm and branching out on my own. I would love to take as many cases as you can provide to me.’ He said, ‘We’d love to have you.’ I left Wilson 90 days later.” Wilson litigation chief Bruce Vanyo did not return calls.
“There are a lot of good things a big firm teaches you but my heart was never into it,” Chanler says. “When I went into law school I had the very idealistic view that I’m going to try to promote constructive change with my law degree.” But the realities of making a living waylaid that goal.
Getting Started
Chanler grew up in the affluent Riverdale section of New York City and after graduating from the University of Denver College of Law took a job on Wall Street.
Working days trading government bonds during the go-go years of the mid-80s, Chanler spent his nights volunteering at the Center for Constitutional Rights. In early 1987 Chanler moved to San Francisco and worked as a securities attorney with David B. Gold & Associates for less than a year before Brobeck made an offer.
Setting up his own practice meant Chanler was no longer a slave to the suit-and-tie set. But independence also meant being free of salary, health insurance, paralegals, computers and other perks of the corporate world.
But within a month, Chanler had negotiated an $86,000 settlement with a Mountain View paint-stripper manufacturer that the defense fund contended violated Prop 65.
He subleased space in Ghiradelli Square and began to recruit an eclectic legal team. Chris Falincelli, a 25-year old Princeton University graduate, actor, and former Lillick & Charles paralegal, is Chanler’s director of Prop 65 investigations.
Suzanne Bevash, a 28-year-old Stanford and UCLA Law School graduate, left McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, also to do Prop 65 work with the fledgling firm.
“You can feel like you’re a standard-brand cog in a big firm,” says Bevash, who was a third-year associate in McCutchen’s environmental unit when she quit. “You have a better sense at a smaller firm that you’re contributing, especially when you’re on the plaintiffs side….plus you save on the drycleaning bills.”
Before long, the addition of investigators and law clerks, meant the firm had to expand from its offices into Chanler’s apartment overlooking the Bay. He now has a staff of two attorneys, three investigators, two law clerks, a legal secretary and a case assistant. “The phone rings at four in the morning and it’s an East Coast attorney saying, ‘My God, you’re in the office already.’ Everyone has keys to my apartment and they come in at all hours of the night to work,” Chanler says.
If the unusual office hours and the staff of T-shirt-and-jeans clad twentysomethings give the firm the air of a college political campaign, the results achieved in the Prop 65 cases so far speak of a committed professionalism, says client David Roe.
“Cliff has quite a core of dedicated people and his hardnosed investigations have been crucial,” Roe says.
But some attorneys who have dealt with Chanler say privately that they wonder whether Roe is behind the strategy that has proven so successful to date.
Chanler is “a pretty smart guy but as far as legal strategy and negotiations go, Cliff just doesn’t have the experience to handle all of it,” says one attorney.
Chanler says that Roe – who he says acted as something of a senior partner in the early days – keeps close tabs on the cases, but that case development and litigation are left up to him.
Other attorneys who have negotiated with Chanler say they found him a tough but reasonable adversary. They asked not to be named, citing ongoing or future cases involving Chanler.
In the coming months, the firm may take a more conventional form as it moves into expanded offices in Ghiradelli Square and takes on a new partner.
Last week, the firm officially became Chanler & Barnaby with the addition of Keith Barnaby, a law school classmate of Chanler who will start in June.
Without discussing the firm’s financing, Chanler says it will continue to devote 98 percent of its time to cases on behalf of nonprofits.
Upcoming cases may involve cases on behalf of the Rainforest Action Network and homeless advocates, he says. But he says he hopes some things stay the same.
“There’s a lot of fun and freedom here. I never was comfortable working long hours in a tie and suit. I accomplish a lot more wearing my jeans in a law library than I do wearing a noose around my neck.”
