Chicago’s Phil Beck hates beepers and cellphones but felt compelled to bring a phone to Thanksgiving dinner at his sister’s in Glen Ellyn.
Discussion inevitably was directed at him and what he, as a Loop lawyer, thought about the presidential election mess. To the chagrin of some of the assembled, including his wife and three sons, his cellphone then rang.
Fred Bartlit Jr., a prominent and macho corporate litigator who is Beck’s Denver-based mentor in a 40-person Chicago-Denver law firm, was telling him to hop the next flight to Tallahassee. They would be assisting the legal team of Texas Gov. George W. Bush.
Two weeks later a Homewood native who knew nothing about voting machines and dimpled chads and who is not especially political although he has tended to vote Republican, has proved an unexpected star in the courtroom dramas at the heart of a historic dispute.
Beck is, as one reporter put it last week, “the killer cross-examiner” who shredded two witnesses for Vice President Al Gore, prompting a major Gore defeat before a state court judge in a quest to count nearly 13,000 disputed ballots. He was also the chief Bush lawyer at a key procedural hearing Friday night forced by the Florida Supreme Court’s reversal of the state judge.
But unlike chief Gore attorney David Boies, the New Yorker who whipped Microsoft in a Washington courtroom, and Barry Richard of Tallahassee, the seemingly bionic Bush attorney with bouffant hairdo and penchant to surface on “Larry King Live!” every other night, Beck was not known to the vast majority of the Bush team when he surfaced in Florida.
“I thought that there was a 20-1 chance that I would have an actual, stand-up role at trial,” Beck said. “I was nobody anybody knew, except for Fred [Bartlit]. I figured I’d play more a backroom role.”
Now, as a result of an unforeseen, bravura performance on center stage, “He’s gonna be steppin’ up and getting some really big cases,” predicted Irv Terrell, a veteran Houston lawyer who assisted his partner, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, in assembling the legal army for Bush. Baker had not heard of Beck until Bartlit broached his name.
It has been a strange few weeks.
“I have been waking up, sleep-deprived and in a strange bed, unsure where I am until I realize, `Oh, I’m involved in the case to decide who will be the president of the United States,'” Beck said.
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His labor was highlighted by a central role in an overwhelming Bush victory before Circuit Judge N. Sanders Sauls, who declined to allow a count of nearly 13,000 disputed votes after a weekend-long trial. It was Gore’s appeal of that decision that prompted the climactic hearing before the Florida Supreme Court and the court’s 4-3 decision Friday in the vice president’s favor.
Evidence of a distinctly higher profile for the Winnetka resident is found close to home.
“My 16-year-old claims he should be able to stay home from school to watch me,” Beck said. “My 19-year-old, beer-guzzling frat boy at the University of Iowa was apparently sitting there whooping and hollering at his dad.”
Beck, 49, was raised in south suburban Homewood, in a family that ran Beck’s Book Stores, whose prime clients were area colleges and universities. He attended the University of Wisconsin and studied law at Boston University before getting a clerkship for a federal judge in Washington, then returning home to work at the giant Loop firm of Kirkland & Ellis.
He stayed there 16 years, before splitting with Bartlit in 1993 to start what is now known, with traditional law firm brevity, as Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott.
Beck’s labors involved the sort of litigation that is a lifeblood of big law firms, even if it doesn’t have the public allure of a juicy murder or political corruption trial. For example, there was a victorious 10-week trial in Philadelphia, where he represented NL Industries, once a big lead company, against pollution charges.
He also has handled a series of cases for Alpha Therapeutic, a Los Angeles drug company that makes medicine from human plasma to help hemophiliacs stop bleeding. In courtrooms in Texas, Missouri and Louisiana, he has fended off individual wrongful-death lawsuits resulting from HIV getting into the nation’s blood supply in the 1970s and in many hemophiliacs contracting AIDS.
“Our defense was that sometimes bad things happen that nobody could have foreseen,” Beck said. “Intellectually, the defense is sound, but it is a very emotional issue, and the challenge was to focus on the science.”
He won jury verdicts in two trials and lost the third but saw that verdict overturned by the judge.
These days he is representing Arthur Andersen in a Minneapolis courtroom, in a contract dispute over computer consulting services, as well as the government of Canada in a lawsuit filed against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., among others. The latter stems from Canada’s having doubled cigarette taxes to fight teen smoking, an act prompting a smuggling conspiracy in which many people went to prison. Beck and Canada lost the initial stage in an upstate New York courtroom and are appealing.
When he arrived in Florida, Beck figured to serve as an anonymous worker bee. Then it became clear there would be full-blown contests by Gore on ballot counting and he was asked to oversee the Bush camp’s expert witnesses.
When the big case wound up before Sauls, the Bush side expected Boies to attack Miami-Dade County officials for halting the recount and those in Palm Beach for too strict a standard on so-called dimpled chad. But Boies’ focus was on other matters.
As a result of the types of witnesses called, “I wound up a featured person when it came to cross-examining their witnesses,” Beck said.
In particular there were Nicolas Hengartner, a Yale statistician, and Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, who counsels state and local governments on election matters. Very methodically, and never asking a question he did not know the answer to, Beck raised doubts about their testimony and revealed inconsistencies that deflated the Gore case.
It’s not that Beck was displaying some rare set of Michael Jordan-like skills. But he did reveal the handiwork of a veteran, savvy litigator.
“He was the most effective attorney in that courtroom,” said Linda Kleindienst, bureau chief for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “You had a distinct sense of watching a real trial attorney at work.”
But there was scant time for kudos.
He went to work on an absentee ballot suit, involving Bay County. He ultimately won as the judge threw out the pro-Gore claims without a trial. Then there was preparation for possible appeals of the Bay County and the two other absentee ballot disputes, in Seminole and Martin Counties, as well as working on the brief prepared by the Bush legal team for a U.S. Supreme Court appeal of Friday’s Florida Supreme Court’s decision.
With at least one all-nighter in recent days, it amounted to a hefty burden for a lawyer who hankered to get back home. When he did, for sure, he would likely find his world had changed.
“On Thanksgiving morning I didn’t know a thing about dimpled ballots and voting machines,” he said self-deprecatingly. “Now I’m an expert!”
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.