Silkenat’s impending presidency caps off more than three decades of leadership within the ABA. In the 1970s, the organization invited Silkenat to join its first delegation to China, and he served as chair of the China Law Committee. He went on to chair the ABA’s Section of International Law, Section Officers Conference, and Standing Committees on Membership and Constitution and Bylaws. Silkenat also sat on the Board of Governors and its Executive Committee and the ABA’s diversity commission, which has provided scholarships totaling more than $3 million to minority law students, as well as the ABA’s Commission on Women in the Profession. For those and other efforts, he received the New York City Bar Association’s Diversity Champion Award in 2009. Among Silkenat’s priorities as president are improving legal education as well as tackling immigration, the death penalty, election reform, and gun violence. “There has been lots of talk among lawyers on those issues but not necessarily real agreement,” he says. “I’m hoping lawyers can provide more information for the public and for the rest of the legal profession, and maybe we can come up with some better answers.”

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Molly Crawford, a senior attorney with the Division of Privacy and Identity Protection at the FTC, described the “Do Not Track” option for consumers. This option, recommended by the FTC, would need to be universally implemented and easy to use. “What we want to see is privacy that is baked in, part of the process, that is not an afterthought,” she said.

However, Randal Milch ’85, executive vice president and general counsel of Verizon, warned that legislation might not be quite so easy to implement. “Attempts to legislate in this area are very freighted with the inability to keep up with technology,” he said. He also argued that part of the difficulty with creating privacy legislation is that the generation creating privacy laws is not the generation most commonly using new technologies. “We try to lock these kids into a regime based on old fogies’ views of what’s private and what’s not private,” he said.

Other panelists included Valerie Caproni, former general counsel to the FBI and currently vice president and deputy general counsel of Northrop Grumman Corporation, and ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump.

Caproni described herself as “the token jack-booted thug for the purpose of this discussion,” arguing that the use of GPS tracking by the police and the FBI is not a violation of Fourth Amendment rights. “When you’re out on the public street, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy, because you can be seen by the public eye,” she said. According to Caproni, GPS location tracking accomplishes the same goal that 24-hour surveillance by several FBI teams would accomplish, just with much more efficient use of manpower.

Crump emphasized the importance of taking into account the fast-changing nature of technology, whether in consumer privacy regulation or criminal justice legislation. “If you had said in 1984 that in 25 years every American would carry a tracking device, you would have been dismissed as crazy. Someone would have handed you a tinfoil hat, or you would have concluded that the Soviets had won the Cold War,” she said. “But that’s the reality that we live in today.”

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It has been 25 years since he got his foot in the door of the prestigious law firm, best known for its mergers and acquisitions practice, and he never did leave. Katz has been earning his paycheck, too: American Lawyer named Katz a dealmaker of the year in 2005 for his representation of Sanofi-Synthelabo in its $68 billion acquisition of Aventis. Last year he was again named an American Lawyer dealmaker of the year and Who’s Who Legal mergers and acquisitions lawyer of the year—for the fourth time in a row—both for representing natural gas provider El Paso in its $37.4 billion acquisition by rival Kinder Morgan that was announced last October. The combined entity is the largest operator of natural gas pipeline in the country, with more than 80,000 miles of pipe.

Although not the largest deal of Katz’s career, it was nevertheless the largest deal in the world in 2011. The most interesting thing about it: If it hadn’t happened, that would have been just fine with Katz and his client. Indeed, the alternative—a taxfree spin-off of El Paso’s gas exploration and production business to shareholders— was already in process. In the M&A world, that’s known as having a strong negotiating position. Katz smiles as he remembers El Paso’s stance from the very start: “It gave us the ability to say, ‘Look, you can negotiate with us and give us the price we want, or we will just go on our merry way.’”

A little background: In February 2011, Kinder Morgan successfully completed the largest-ever initial public offering for a private equity–backed company, raising a $2.9 billion war chest. It was looking to do a deal, and El Paso was in its sights.

Meanwhile, El Paso was minding its own business. In May 2011, the company announced a plan to separate into two companies—the pipeline business as well as the tax-free spin-off of the company’s E&P business. The idea was to give shareholders the choice of whether they wanted to own the two different businesses or to sell their shares of either. That August, El Paso filed a registration statement for the spin-off with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The next day, Kinder made an unsolicited offer of $25.50 per share for El Paso—a 35 percent premium to El Paso’s closing price.

At that point, Katz and his partners at Wachtell, Lipton became a crucial part of the discussions. (The six key members of Katz’s Wachtell team included tax partner Jodi Schwartz (LL.M. ’87).)

“The role of the corporate lawyer has changed quite a bit over the last 20 years,” says Katz from his corner office on the 27th floor of the CBS building. The room is literally stuffed to capacity with deal toys as well as a growing number of awards and framed news articles. He has carved space behind his desk, however, for two signed Peanuts comic strips. “We’re much more involved in the business aspects of a deal in addition to the legal aspects,” he continues. “And there are a lot of business issues. How do you get the best price? What strategy do you use? How do you counter other bids? Are they going to go hostile or not? You end up holding hands with a lot of different people.”

At the end of the day, however, there are really only two questions: Will the deal get done? And on what terms? Katz says the job of the deal lawyer is to help the client achieve as much certainty as it can on both fronts—certainty of value and certainty of consummation. Katz used the alternative of the spin-off as leverage in getting as much certainty of consummation as he could possibly get. And he got a lot.

“It would have been harder if they’d come knocking right after we’d announced the spin-off, but we’d been at it for several months,” he says. “We had an alternative we could pursue unilaterally.”

The biggest risk? Financing the deal. “We were not prepared to let them proceed without having an agreement that they would get the financing done,” says Katz. It proved a non-issue, as Barclays eventually provided $11.5 billion in financing.

Given the size of the combined companies, there was also potential for antitrust issues. Facing Kinder counsel Thomas Roberts of Weil, Gotshal & Manges across the negotiating table, Katz obtained what is known as a hell or high water provision that ensured Kinder Morgan would do what was necessary for regulatory authorities to approve the deal.

El Paso sought a so-called standstill agreement that would have precluded Kinder Morgan from going hostile had negotiations faltered. The Kinder team balked but eventually agreed to limited due diligence so as to expedite negotiations over price.

After weeks of back-and-forth, agreement was reached on October 16 for a deal at $25.91 per El Paso share, plus a sweetener of warrants that brought the total to $26.87, a 37 percent premium to El Paso’s share price at the time. The deal finally closed on May 24, 2012.

“A mistake people frequently make is to draw lines in the sand when they don’t really have an answer as to how to bridge a gap,” Katz says. “We had a gap in value. And the parties were pretty set on what each side was going to accept. But nobody knew exactly what the warrant was going to be worth over time, so it allowed us to bridge the gap.”

As luck, or deft lawyering, would have it, Kinder Morgan’s stock price has moved up since signing, making the warrants much more valuable.

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At its 35th anniversary celebration this spring, One to World, a cultural exchange organization, gave Garbus a Fulbright Award for Global Leadership. In his inspiring acceptance speech, Garbus described a long-ago “small act” he performed when he was a member of the Fair Trial Committee for Chilean Political Prisoners, and the impact he later learned he had made. Here is an edited excerpt:

In September 1973, Salvatore Allende was killed, and in December, Augusto Pinochet put 12 prominent defendants who supported Allende on trial, including General Alberto Bachelet. Pinochet claimed these were open trials, but no one, including the media, could get in.

I would get up at four in the morning and work my way through the people and the blockade. In court, the military hovered over me. After a few more days, the Chilean government left me alone. In the enormous courtroom I was the only outsider, and the defense lawyers and I were the only civilians.

I saw Bachelet, spoke to him, spent some time with him each day before court started, before and after lunch, and during the breaks. When the defendants went back to the barracks, they were beaten and tortured. They had not seen their families since they were arrested.

Bachelet asked me to deliver his last words to his daughter, and I did. Bachelet’s wife, Angela Jeria, and his 21-year-old daughter Michelle were also arrested and tortured.

The guilty verdict came down a few days later. After weeks in Chile, I left feeling awful. The genocide continued. What I did felt meaningless. Bachelet, 51 years old, died in prison on March 12, 1974.

Michelle Bachelet, after a lifetime of politics, became president of Chile in 2006, totally committed to the punishment of Pinochet and his men.

Several weeks ago, a former New York Times reporter met Michelle Bachelet, who now runs the United Nations Women’s Agency, and called to tell me what he learned. She told him of the enormous significance to her of my coming to the trials. She saw two things in my presence in the courtroom: a commitment from people outside of the United States government to reach in and help even if the government would not do it, and that someone had pierced the Pinochet killing machine. The Pinochet regime was four months old and was seemingly less impregnable. This helped teach her, at 21, of the power of the smallest resistance. Small acts can become extremely significant.

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With an English degree from Harvard, Alger entered the two-year investment-banking program at Goldman Sachs. Business school was the traditional next step, but banking had been such a culture shock to her that she instead decided on NYU Law. “Law school seemed like the liberal arts major’s alternative,” she says.

But shortly after Alger became an associate for Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr in 2007, the global economy cascaded into full crisis and she felt its effects in her proximity. The firm transferred her from its corporate group to bankruptcy, and around her there were layoffs and hiring and salary freezes. She found a refuge in writing. Mining material from the collapse around her and her personal insight into families in the money management business, Alger began work on The Darlings, her debut novel, which was published this year.

Set contemporaneously, the book tells the story of the Darling family, a wealthy New York City clan that exists in the rarefied air of Manhattan’s Upper East Side where, even during the financial crisis, charity balls, private schools, and billion-dollar real estate deals are the order of the day. The gilded cocoon crashes down around them over Thanksgiving weekend 2008, when patriarch Carter Darling finds himself, and his family, about to lose everything in the wake of a massive Bernard Madoff–like financial scandal.

“There was a lot of nonfiction that came out relatively quickly, that I thought was wonderfully written but fell short of getting into the kind of human backstory behind what was going on,” she says of other books analyzing the Madoff scandal. “I was more curious about the families and how it affected them.”

Alger’s professional background may have provided the knowledge necessary to write a dramatic thriller set against the complex world of banking transactions and SEC investigations, but it was her first-year Lawyering course that taught her how to put words on the page.

The first paper she submitted to her professor, Doni Gewirtzman, came back covered in red and with a B-minus. Alger was shocked. Gewirtzman guessed that she had been an English major in college. Alger recollects, “He said to me, ‘Ugh, you English majors put so many adjectives in front of everything.’”

Alger says making the switch from descriptive to economical writing was painful at first but essential to her work as a writer, which since 2010 has become her full-time career. “I learned in that class how to streamline my thoughts and not default to language that’s just pretty,” she says. “My mom still tells me, ‘You would never have been able to be a novelist if you hadn’t gone to law school, where you learned how to write.’”

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“The scope of our ambition was colossal,” says Wolfson now. “We intended to produce the first wide-scale technique to produce oil for fuels.”

Fast-forward 15 years, and Wolfson is the CEO of Solazyme, a company he co-founded with Dillon that produces an algae-based oil that has been used to power a commercial jet and a Navy ship. Here’s how the technology works: They place plant-based sugars into fermentation tanks and introduce algae. The algae then convert the sugar into oil that can be applied diversely as fuel for engines or to make soap, cosmetics, and even food.

Wolfson, who was the guest at a dean’s roundtable last October (see all of the dean’s 2011-12 guests at right), believes the technology is potentially world-changing. Big business seems to be listening, as Wolfson has inked partnerships with Dow Chemical, United Airlines, and the Department of Defense. He and Dillon took the company public in 2011, raising $227 million. And they are hiring at such a pace that Solazyme is effectively a new company every 18 months.

So far, though, their production has been relatively modest, and the open question to Wolfson is whether they can scale up to levels at which they could meaningfully compete in the global oil market. Solazyme’s investors are about to find out. This spring he negotiated a deal with agribusiness giant Bunge to build a factory in Brazil that will produce oil for chemical and fuel products at a volume five times greater than the company has ever attempted. Bunge’s investment represents an unprecedented bet on both Solazyme and the biofuel industry.

So how has Wolfson convinced several of the world’s largest and most conservative companies to place bets on this new and relatively untested technology?

“Jonathan can identify opportunity where others see risk,” says Dillon. “He has an ability to see down the field that you’re frankly not going to get in large, slow-moving corporations.”

Take, for instance, Wolfson’s decision in 2003 to found Solazyme with Dillon. Wolfson was three years out of NYU and working for a software company in New York. Meanwhile, Dillon, his former college roommate at Emory, had only recently earned his doctorate in genetics. The two friends knew from the basic science that algae could produce oil through photosynthesis. So they hatched an untested plan to build bioreactors and ponds where the algae would be exposed to direct sunlight.

They had very little hard evidence to confirm that the model would actually work on a commercial scale. But for Wolfson the idea was enough to compel him to quit his job, buy a $600 car off Craigslist, drive cross-country to California and, in the quasimythical tradition of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, set up shop in Dillon’s Santa Clara garage.

The pair devoted a year to securing funding and building the reactors. Then reality hit. The ponds did not produce enough oil to make the company commercially viable. “It was a real meet-your-maker moment,” remembers Wolfson. Faced with that failure, Wolfson doubled down and went back to his investors—many of whom were family and friends—and asked for more money to try an equally untested method of introducing the plant sugars to algae in the dark.

The experiment worked, but Wolfson took a detour instead of building capital- intensive factories immediately: He focused instead on positioning Solazyme more broadly as a renewable oil company, which would enable it to penetrate several industries on a smaller scale.

Solazyme was openly scoffed at within the burgeoning biofuel industry. “Jonathan and I would speak at these big biofuel conferences, and we were literally ridiculed for talking about having a food business,” Dillon recalls. “We were viewed as taking our eye off the trillion-dollar fuel market.”

But the bet paid off. The partnerships that Wolfson forged with food, cosmetics, and chemical companies made Solazyme profitable while it continued to develop fuels for cars, ships, and planes on a small scale. Environmentalists as well as the fuel industry paid attention last fall when United Airlines used the company’s Solajet fuel to make the first commercial flight using microbially derived biofuel, and the U.S. Navy powered a destroyer up the coast of California with the company’s diesel fuel.

“Failure on some level is your friend,” says Wolfson, pausing for a moment to reflect. “You have to be willing and open to the idea that everything you do isn’t going to succeed.”

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Cosmetics are glamorous, of course, but Moss’s portfolio at the Estée Lauder Companies consists of all the responsibilities that go along with advising a $24 billion company that sells its products in more than 150 countries: drafting public filings, developing corporate governance best practices, overseeing a staff of 32 lawyers, and handling everything from trademark, patent, and licensing issues to lawsuits charging antitrust violations and animal cruelty. Serious stuff, by any measure. “What keeps me up at night are global regulations issues,” Moss says, sitting in her stylishly appointed office graced with a tall orchid. Nothing is uniform across borders, she explains; what works in one country does not necessarily apply in another.

Despite the challenges, she feels blessed. She did not intend to go into corporate law, but she’s happy where she has ended up. “I wanted to be that lawyer running up the courthouse steps,” Moss says. But as she pointed out to the audience when she accepted her award in February, sometimes ending up somewhere you hadn’t planned can turn out to be a good thing.

“The best advice I can give you,” she told the organization’s members, “is to support each other, take risks, and follow your heart. Find passion in your work, make time for the people you love, and have some fun along the way.”

This advice has worked well for Moss. Seizing opportunities has led to a career path as twisty as a mascara wand. Moss didn’t start her professional life as a lawyer; she taught history in a high school in New Haven, Connecticut. After graduating from NYU School of Law, she clerked for Judge Constance Baker Motley of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, whose illustrious career as a lawyer, New York state senator, Manhattan borough president, and judge was devoted to civil rights and women’s rights. “It was probably the best career decision I ever made,” she said.

Over the next two decades, she bounced between public and private litigation, working as an associate for Davis Polk & Wardwell and as an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York, and even helping to start a white collar and corporate defense firm, Howard, Smith & Levin. But in 1996 another opportunity presented itself and Moss seized it: an offer to serve as general counsel for Pitney Bowes. Moss stepped off the partnership ladder once again.

The job had its advantages, including better hours so that she could spend more time with her four young children. But her new employer, located in Stamford, Connecticut, was also nearly 40 miles from Manhattan. On the day of the terrorist attacks in 2001, she couldn’t get back to her children, who were working or in school in the city. The moment drove Moss to make yet another career U-turn: to find a job closer to home (she told her bosses she would stick around until a replacement, whom she helped find, was hired). “It was not so rational,” she says. “But after 9/11, I made the decision to never be that far away while I had children who were still at home.”

Moss’s friend of 35 years, Ruth Hochberger, former editor-in-chief of the New York Law Journal and now a professor of legal journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, calls her devotion to her children extraordinary. Indeed, photos of her four children—now adults—line her office shelves. “She is always there for her children, finding a balance in a way that a lot of successful women find very difficult to do,” says Hochberger. “She’s very disciplined at setting aside time for them.”

Finding the ideal job close to home, however, took longer than she expected. She flirted with the possibility of joining Court TV or a public interest group, but in September 2003 she began the job at Estée as general counsel. The job, so far, has been the perfect fit, letting her exercise her legal muscles but allowing her the flexibility to spend time with her family.

That’s not to say she doesn’t miss the courtroom. Litigation, Moss confesses, still gets her adrenaline pumping. “I’m a litigator in remission,” she says with a laugh. “I have to strap myself into my seat to not jump up when the company is involved in litigation.”

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Brafman spoke about his DSK experiences and handling media pressure to an audience of more than 400 attending the Annual Alumni Luncheon at the Pierre Hotel on January 20. During the business portion of the luncheon preceding Brafman’s talk, outgoing Law Alumni Association president Emily Campbell ’95 introduced the new president-elect, Rocco Andriola ’82 (ll .m. ’86), who expressed eagerness to accept his new role. Campbell received a citation from Vice Dean Jeannie Forrest expressing the Law School’s deep appreciation for her service.

Neil Barofsky ’95, senior fellow at the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law and former special inspector general of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, introduced “When the Media and the Criminal Justice System Collide,” Brafman’s keynote address. “If you get in trouble, there is no better advocate in the world to have on your side than Ben Brafman,” Barofsky said. The principal of Brafman & Associates, Brafman first honed his quick thinking as a stand-up comic while working his way through college, then as an assistant district attorney for the very office that would drop the DSK charges decades later.

The DSK case landed Brafman and his client on front pages all over the globe. “I am on a world stage with no script, dancing as fast as I can,” he said. “When I’m right I’m a hero, and when I’m wrong I’m a jerk. And it’s the same talent, it’s the same skill, it’s the same effort. You win, it’s good. You lose, someone’s life is over. And I mean over…. You have to maintain your focus. And like a tsunami, you have to hold on very tight to something that’s grounded and wait until the wave passes and hope you’re still standing.”

Such experiences don’t leave Brafman feeling bitter toward the press. “I like the media,” he said to an audience that included journalists Katie Couric and Jeffrey Toobin, both his invited guests. “But the press has a great deal of protection…. If I am a public figure in the crosshairs of the media, anything you want to say about me is essentially fair game.”

Brafman acknowledged that the blame for media frenzies is a shared one. He characterized the DSK case, for example, as vastly overhyped: “The priorities of the media have to be carefully looked at…yet it’s not the media that’s at fault. It’s us. We were junkies. We needed to have more and more and more material and information about something that really wasn’t—in my opinion, anyway—that interesting.”

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