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The Oregon Supreme Court last week dismissed ethics charges against Lois Rosenbaum and Barnes Ellis, two prominent Portland lawyers, in what had become one of the longest-running and most high-profile ethics cases in years.
The case pitted the Oregon State Bar, which regulates 14,000 Oregon lawyers, against two pillars of the state's largest law firm, Stoel Rives (Ellis retired from the firm before the case concluded). The bar had charged Ellis and Rosenbaum with playing both sides of a legal case—representing a company under investigation and also its executives, even though the interests of the company and those employees diverged.
Ellis and Rosenbaum fought the case all the way to the Oregon Supreme Court, which overturned the bar's findings last week. (WW reported in detail about the case in 2012, and the bar's initial findings in 2013. The Oregonian, which wrote about the initial ethics complaint in 2010, first reported the supreme court ruling's Friday.)
At issue was Ellis and Rosenbaum's representation of FLIR Systems, a Wilsonville high-tech firm, and about 40 of FLIR's employees, including most it the company's senior executives. The case dates all the way back to 2000, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission began an investigation into FLIR's accounting practices. A federal criminal proceeding followed the SEC's civil review.
In May 2013, a bar trial panel cleared Rosenbaum and Ellis of some alleged violations of the Bar's Rules of Professional Conduct and found they'd violated others, engaging in conflicts of interest because they should not have been representing the company and employees at the same time—especially when the company and employees could have different agendas.
Ellis and Rosenbaum argued that they had made the appropriate disclosures to all sides, and that the conflict of interest the bar cited didn't exist.
Bar spokeswoman Kateri Walsh says the organization is disappointed with the outcome.
"It was a hard-fought case," Walsh says. "We obviously accept the conclusion of the court."
For Rosenbaum and Ellis, the vindication comes after an unusually long, expensive and vigorous pursuit by the bar.
"We are very pleased with the Court's decision," Rosenbaum tells WW via email. "We always believed, and the Court found, that our representation was in all our clients' best interests, involved no conflict of interest, and was consistent with national practice in the specialized practice of securities litigation."
WWeek 2015