“My client is a very, very private man,” Donald Bren defense lawyer John B. Quinn told Am Law Litigation Daily, “but the asking price for avoiding trial was not something he could live with.” So the Irvine Company’s billionaire owner endured being painted as a distant, unloving father and having intimate personal details revealed—and won his highly publicized court case. An L.A. jury decided Aug. 26 that two adult children Bren had out of wedlock with ex-girlfriend Jennifer McKay Gold weren’t entitled to $134 million in additional support on top of the several million Bren already had given them over the years. The real winners were the legal team headed by L.A. super lawyer Quinn, the hard-as-nails founder of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, which took over the case last year from O’Melveny & Myers. Quinn told Litigation Daily that the case presented the defense with a “pretty scary dynamic.” In mock trials men tended to agree that Bren had fulfilled contractual agreements with Gold. But, Quinn said, “a lot of women, including my wife, had a hard time getting over” Bren’s coolness toward the kids. Yet the actual jury was different—five of the six women but only four of the six men sided with Bren …
OC Congressman Dana Rohrabacher frequently invokes the amiable conservatism of his former boss, President Ronald Reagan, and recently he practiced it. When Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez found herself outnumbered 5-1 on an OC Forum panel featuring the county’s entire congressional delegation, Republican Rohrabacher offered up some of his allotted time so Sanchez could continue rebutting the other panelists’ criticisms of the federal economic stimulus. Two days later Rohrabacher and wife Rhonda had visiting Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, powerful chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, and his partner Jim Ready over to their Huntington Beach home for a barbecue …
Frank spent a busy weekend here. He walked precincts with Sanchez, attended a breakfast fundraiser for her at the Newport Beach Yacht Club, spoke at UCI, keynoted the OC Democratic Party’s Truman dinner at the UFCW Local 324 hall in Buena Park and discussed financial reform and other topics with more than 100 employees of Pacific Life Insurance Co. in Newport Beach …
Where do attendees of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ Space Expo at the Anaheim Convention Center go for a little fun? A hundred aerospace execs and Pentagon brass were bused to Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana for a cocktail reception and tour of the new Boeing Rocket Lab …
Former guv and former state attorney general George Deukmejian is special guest at a fundraiser for AG candidate Steve Cooley Thursday at Antonello Rist-orante in South Coast Plaza Village …
Dueling fundraisers on Saturday night: South Coast Rep’s gala at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach and the Life Changing Lives gala (featuring “American Idols” Taylor Hicks and Katharine McPhee) at the Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel.
