Lawyer: Greenberg Too Famous To Get A Fair Trial
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
High-powered attorney David Boies launched a novel defense yesterday for his wealthy client, Maurice Greenberg: He’s too famous to be treated fairly by the legal system.
Speaking before a student audience at the New York University School of Law, Mr. Boies said the legal system disadvantages the rich and famous, just as it does the impoverished and obscure.
Mr. Greenberg is being sued by the state for alleged improper accounting practices at the insurance giant he used to manage, AIG. Last month AIG settled a lawsuit independent of Mr. Greenberg for $1.64 billion.
Although many of Mr. Boies’s high profile clients – including Al Gore in Bush v. Gore – are able to afford fleets of lawyers in their defense, they often make attractive targets for prosecutors, Boies said. “More often than not, the people you are defending have disadvantages, and those are not always of race and poverty,” Mr. Boies said yesterday. “Those disadvantages can simply be having a high public profile and being somebody people want to attack.”
Referring to Mr. Greenberg, Mr. Boies said: “He has clearly gotten more scrutiny than he would have.”
Mr. Boies also said individual citizens increasingly must defend themselves against the huge legal staffs and mountains of evidence that corporations bring to court.
