Gibson Dunn Crutcher

The state's largest law firm will ask a Superior Court judge to set aside a verdict by an Orange County jury that awarded $70,000 to a former Huntington Beach homeowner who accused the firm of malicious prosecution, a lawyer for the firm, Robert W. Loewen, said Thursday. The jury ruled Wednesday that the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher acted with malice when it filed a defamation lawsuit on behalf of its client, S&S Construction Co.

A 78-year-old Point Loma widow says she's been taken for a ride by the state's largest law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. In an 81-page lawsuit, Blanche Pope charges that the very lawyer who was giving her legal advice on a northern San Diego County land deal also represented two Orange County developers on the same deal and subjugated her best interests to the developers'.

Herbert S. Schwab, who as a supply officer in World War II helped convert a distinguished teaching college for women into a boot camp for WAVES, the feminine arm of the Navy, has died. His wife, Virginia, who met Schwab there when they both were naval officers at Hunter College in New York City, said her husband was 80 and retired in 1975 as director of administration of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, Los Angeles' largest law firm and ranked No. 4 in the nation.

WorldCom Inc., the second-biggest U.S. long-distance telephone provider, said Tuesday that it had hired Los Angeles-based law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher to investigate allegations that the company illegally avoided paying network access fees to rivals. WorldCom, which is changing its name to MCI, also said it was reviewing its relationships with small companies that find cheaper routes for some phone traffic.

Unlike blue jeans, office space is not designed to shrink to fit--a fact painfully clear to many Southern California law firms, which make up a significant chunk of the area's top-dollar tenants. For a number of firms, having too much office space is only the beginning of the problem. The rest is that today, sub-lease rates for their excess space in Downtown Los Angeles office buildings are at rock-bottom, compared to peak-market prices they are paying on leases dating back to the 1980s.

It must have been an odd sight: four young attorneys from one of the largest law firms in California, dressed in their business suits, briefcases in hand and unable to speak Spanish, investigating the massacre of 15 peasants in a Third-World war zone known as El Salvador. For June McIvor, a Marina del Rey resident who normally handles corporate buyouts, very little in her elite East Coast schooling prepared her for what she would find.

WASHINGTON - Certain law partners no longer call Theodore B. Olson for lunch. Old friends no longer come to dinner at his sprawling house in the woods near the Potomac. One of his best friends died in December, somewhat estranged. All since Olson - the conservative legal hero, crusader against Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, defender of George W. Bush - signed on to fight for same-sex marriage in California, a battle that he will take to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday when he challenges Proposition 8, the state measure that banned gay marriage.