(by Tim Pierce via Wikimedia)
While less catchy than “I’ve got a plan,” Elizabeth Warren’s campaign has put considerable effort into making transparency an additional pillar of her run. She’s put out a decade’s worth of tax returns and spends a good deal of time subtly and indirectly reminding folks that Joe Biden spent decades as the “Senior Senator from Visa” and Mayor Pete just refuses to talk about whole years of his life like he’s a Tom Hardy character returning to claim an inheritance. And mostly what Warren’s gotten for all her efforts is a bunch of undeserved flack.
The lesson is, to quote Homer Simpson, never try.
The latest public dragging she’s getting stems from her decision to release around 30 years of records relaying her legal work as a bankruptcy expert. Ironically, it’s a move she was prompted to take because of attacks from Buttigieg who started aggressively deflecting from his own opacity by calling out his rivals — a tactic that might be unsavory but empirically works on the mainstream media as evidenced by the mere existence of the current administration. So when Warren released her records, she got coverage like this from the Washington Post:
An alternative title not prepared to cater to the legally illiterate would be “Nationally Recognized Bankruptcy Specialist Earned Around $60K/Year As A Lawyer.” Social media is encouragingly pushing back at the mainstream narrative by pointing out that this story only seems to prove that Warren was underpaid for three decades of legal work proving that there are still a lot of people in the country who have a vague clue about the law. Unfortunately, the Twittersphere isn’t backed by a publishing empire.
Here we are yet again with the press trying to gin up outrage by trying to play up how much money attorneys make for their work. Yet this is a uniquely stupid episode in this ongoing trend because as journalistically irresponsible as it is to get breathless over a Biglaw partner billing a few hundred bucks an hour, it’s even dumber to try to tag someone as a hypocritical plutocrat for making $1.9 million over 30 years when there are partners making $1.9 million every six months that wouldn’t even get a society page blurb.
The most charitable reading of this coverage is that even if the amounts are disingenuously hyped, it’s significant that an attorney so fixated on standing up to corporate greed would take work from corporations:
For instance, the documents released Sunday show that Warren made about $80,000 from work she did for creditors in the energy company Enron’s bankruptcy and $20,000 as a consultant for Dow Chemical, a company that was trying to limit the liability it faced from silicone breast implants that were made by a connected firm.
Enron’s creditors may have been corporations themselves, but representing them is actually in line with Warren’s central thesis that unregulated corporate greed screws people over. The breast implant work dealt with Dow buying out another company and, almost assuredly, had to do with who was on the hook for damages, as opposed to whether or not someone was on the hook. That’s pretty standard legal work. We’ve addressed before the limits of blaming attorneys for their clients. There’s not really a contradiction between arguing for Bankruptcy Code reform and counseling folks on how the current Code works.
No, what this coverage is all about is a cheap bid to turn one candidate’s transparency against them by playing to prejudices about the value of lawyers through misleading headlines.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren earned nearly $2 million consulting for corporations and financial firms, records show [Washington Post]
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.