Valley Talk Who’s the Joke On Now? Without doubt, at an April 25 reception honoring the San Fernando Valley Business Journal’s Top 25 Lawyers, Greg Lippe had every reason to feel outnumbered. The managing partner of the CPA firm of Lever, Lippe, Hellie and Russell LLP looked out over the sea of lawyers and noted how much things had changed in recent months. Beginning with the Enron and Andersen debacles and moving on to the struggle Tyco International Ltd. has had with accounting irregularities, Lippe said these are “unusual” times for accountants. “Finally,” he said, “we’ve got something on lawyers. People now have more jokes to tell about us than they do about you.” Cheap, Not Better Ever wonder what business executives do when they can’t hire a high-priced accounting firm to cover up their misdeeds? David Gurnick, now a partner with Arter & Hadden LLP, found out when he began practicing law. A client Gurnick was representing came to him about an employee who was skimming from the company. The employee, it seems, was independently selling the company’s products to accounts in Indonesia and pocketing the money, but he had to devise a way to explain the parts he was shipping off illicitly. So he cut and pasted portions of the sales invoices to other, legitimate customer invoices to compensate for the missing inventory. “You had to look at the lines and alignment of text and see if the receipts had been doctored,” Gurnick recalls. How good a job did this wayward employee do? “He did a very good job, but not quite good enough,” said Gurnick. We’d say the high-priced accounting firm would get the same rating. On the Other Side Encino attorney James Blatt can wax nostalgic about his law clerking days with the District Attorney’s Office in the early 1970s, but none of his recollections was stranger than when he encountered what seemed to be just another ’60s flower child in the hall of the courthouse. “I was just a kid at 21 working as a law clerk in the D.A.’s office, and every day I’d walk past these hippies sitting around in the hallway,” he said. “One day one of these girls approached me and tried to recruit me. I knew they were part of Charlie Manson’s family. There used to be five or six of them camped out there everyday. It was crazy. “I just looked at her and said, ‘Sorry, I’m on the other side.’ I thought that would be the end of it, but she tried a couple of more times with me. I guess I looked like a good prospect for them.”