Judicial Notice (07.08.23): Elon Musk v. Wachtell Lipton

A fight over a giant legal fee, a naughty judge on TikTok, a law firm on the ropes, and other legal news from the week that was.

Unlike pretty much every other Am Law 100 firm, Wachtell Lipton has a single office, in the CBS Building in midtown Manhattan (photo by David Lat).

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I hope everyone had a wonderful Fourth of July. As usual, we spent the holiday up at our family’s place in the Berkshires—and went to Tanglewood on the Fourth itself for the James Taylor concert, rain notwithstanding. The holiday falling on Tuesday made for a relaxing week; I had the sense that many took it easy or took the week off entirely. And in case you’re wondering, in 2024 the Fourth will be on a Thursday, so expect more of the same next year.

So I didn’t do a heck of a lot. But I did manage to record a new episode of Movers, Shakers & Rainmakers, in which Zach Sandberg and I interviewed Amy Mallow of Vertex Advisors, a leading consultancy for professional-services firms.

Now, on to the news.

Lawyer of the Week: Sasha Dadan.

For weeks, folks have been wondering: who would end up representing Waltine Nauta, the personal aide to former president Donald Trump and now Trump’s co-defendant in the Mar-a-Lago documents case? Although Nauta did have one lawyer, D.C.-based Stanley Woodward, he needed a Florida lawyer admitted to practice in the Southern District of Florida. Representing Walt Nauta had a certain appeal: it will generate lots of publicity, the case against Nauta is weaker than the case against Trump, Nauta is a more sympathetic defendant than Trump, and Nauta is more likely to follow his lawyer’s advice than Trump. Word on the street was that some top trial lawyers in the Sunshine State, including the renowned David Markus, were considering it.

But it looks like Walt Nauta has settled for a less prominent advocate, at least for now: Sasha Dadan, a solo practitioner whose website touts her expertise in DUI and dog-bite cases. According to Law360, the 34-year-old graduate of Florida A&M Law served as a public defender before launching her own firm focused on criminal and family law. Although Dadan is admitted to practice in the Southern District, her registration with PACER, the federal courts’ electronic docketing system, was expired at the time of Nauta’s Thursday arraignment—so Magistrate Judge Edwin Torres directed the clerk to accept Dadan’s filings on an interim basis while she updates it. A search in PACER pulls up only a single federal case in Florida for Dadan: Nauta’s.

Why Dadan? Lawyers in Trumpworld fall into two camps, experienced defense lawyers and political types, and Dadan looks like the latter. Although she appears to have little experience in federal court, she does have experience in politics: in 2018, she mounted an unsuccessful campaign for a seat in the Florida legislature. Running as a Republican, she declared that she wanted to “make sure our borders don’t invite illegal immigrants to come here and commit crimes” Très MAGA, no?

In other Trump legal news, Georgia lawyer L. Lin Wood, who unsuccessfully tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election on behalf of the former president, will soon be a former lawyer. The Georgia Bar dropped two investigations into Wood after granting his retirement request, telling him in a letter, “You may not practice law in this State or in any other state or jurisdiction, and you may not hold yourself out as a lawyer.” In his own letter to the bar, Wood declared that his retirement is “unqualified, irrevocable, and permanent”—so that might be the last we hear of him. Here’s hoping. (And too bad we can’t get his most infamous former client to retire from public life.)

In memoriam: Fred Hiestand, a prominent tort-reform advocate who served as general counsel of the Civil Justice Association of California, passed away at 79. May he rest in peace.

Judge of the Week: Judge Gary Wilcox.

TikTok: it’s not just for teenage girls. There are surprising number of lawyers on the wildly popular app—and, as it turns out, at least one judge. Until recently.