Roberta Kaplan launches new boutique with former prosecutors

Roberta Kaplan , the veteran trial lawyer who represented New York writer E. Jean Carroll in her landmark lawsuits against Donald Trump, is leaving the firm she founded seven years ago to start a new outfit with a trio of close friends.

The litigator is departing Kaplan Hecker & Fink to start a boutique that will focus on civil litigation, internal corporate investigations and strategic advisory, she said in a statement. Tim Martin, another Kaplan Hecker & Fink partner, is leaving with her. The new firm will be called Kaplan Martin.

Kaplan Hecker & Fink’s unexpected growth to more than 100 lawyers and staff nudged Kaplan to make a change, she said, just three years after she and her colleagues celebrated the opening of an expanded office at the Empire State Building. She also said she wants to focus less on white collar matters, now a focus at her old firm.

“It’s really that the firm grew rapidly, which is great, but it grew in size and complexity beyond what I had in mind and I wanted to get back to something nimbler,” Kaplan said in an interview.

Kaplan’s departure had been in discussions at the firm for many months, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The move will test Kaplan’s ability to bring her clients with her — again. She said all of her clients, with one exception, followed her when she left Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the large firm where she worked for 25 years, to co-found Kaplan Hecker & Fink in 2017.

Boies’ Choice to Defend Disgraced Judge Points to Immunity Test

David Boies, one of the country’s best-known lawyers, charges more than $2,000 an hour and at age 83 can have his pick of cases.

This raises a question as to why he would defend disgraced former bankruptcy judge David R. Jones, who is fighting lawsuits that allege he benefited from a personal relationship with a lawyer who worked on cases in his court.

The answer points to Boies’ self-professed passion for judicial independence. The suits offer a rare opportunity to test judicial immunity and potentially dictate when federal judges can be sued for actions on the bench.

“David Boies probably wants to test the law on how far judicial immunity goes, and it’s an interesting academic question,” said Nancy Rapoport , a professor at UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law. “His argument is going to be: Where do you draw the line?”

His concerns for judicial independence aside, Boies has picked a client who has few defenders in the legal community.

“Everybody’s entitled to a lawyer and David Boies has a great reputation as a great lawyer, and he’s represented some really disreputable people,” said Michael Frisch, ethics counsel at Georgetown Law. “So, add one to the list.”

Big Law Bulks Up in Race to Harness the Power of the Sun

I’m Roy Strom , and today we look at how Big Law firms are helping power the transition to solar energy. Sign up to receive this column in your Inbox on Thursday mornings.

Big Law is a follow-the-money business. And there is a flood of cash flowing into solar power.

Global investment in solar photovoltaic energy production will pass $500 billion this year, predicts the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental research agency. That’s nearly $100 billion more than the investments in generating electricity from coal, oil, natural gas, wind, and nuclear energy combined, the agency says.

Demand for solar and other renewable projects has spiked so dramatically since the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, which piled subsidies into the market, that many law firms feel they can’t keep up with all the work.

“We just don’t have enough lawyers to do it all,” said Eli Katz , global vice chair of the energy and infrastructure industry group at Latham & Watkins. More than 650 lawyers at the firm globally, including around 400 in the US, work on the energy transition and routinely bill above 100% of productivity targets. The group’s headcount has grown at least fivefold in roughly the past decade, Katz said.

Firms that haven’t developed strong energy transition practices are poaching lawyers from other firms “pretty ruthlessly,” said Anna Kimbrell , who leads Husch Blackwell’s Energy & Natural Resources team. “It is very niche, very boutique, and it commands very high rates,” Kimbrell said. “So every law firm wants a renewable energy group even if they don’t have one.”

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