Baird Given $507,105 as Counsel for Aetna : Transition: Attorney general-designate pledges to reduce financial conflicts of interest tied to her holdings.
Attorney General-designate Zoe Baird disclosed Monday that she received $507,105 last year as Aetna Life & Casualty Co.’s general counsel and she pledged to reduce “to the maximum possible extent” financial conflicts of interest tied to her holdings of listed and unlisted securities.
Baird, 40, the first woman named to the nation’s top legal post, also said in a Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire that she plans to shed all of her Aetna security holdings and those in General Electric Corp., where she previously worked as a counsel.
“My representatives are in discussions with the Office of Government Ethics and Department of Justice officials with a view toward minimizing my financial interest conflicts to the maximum possible extent,” Baird said in a questionnaire response, submitted for her confirmation hearing, tentatively set for Jan. 19.
She said this would be accomplished “either through divestitures of all or substantially all of my current individual investments (with reinvestment in government securities and broadly diversified mutual funds) or through the creation of a qualified diversified trust.”
Baird did not specify whether any trust would be “blind,” or whether she would know how her funds were invested. A lawyer assisting Baird in the confirmation process did not return a call.
Baird listed total assets of $2.3 million and liabilities of $60,000 on her net worth statement, which included her assets and those of her husband, Paul D. Gewirtz, a Yale Law School professor.
The listed securities were mainly stock funds, but also included Southern New England Telephone, Pacific Gas & Electric, U.S. Steel, General Motors and $337,522 in an academic pension fund.
In addition to the salary she earned as Aetna’s senior vice president and general counsel, Baird said she was paid $36,000 last year as a member of the board of directors of Southern New England Telephone.
Baird, in describing her legal experience, said she had “undertaken a major initiative to create a dialogue within the American legal community aimed at changing the approach to compensating lawyers and law firms.”
This was a reference to her campaigning for so-called “value billing,” which is an attempt to move away from charging for legal work based solely on hourly charges--a practice that Baird contends contributes to public animosity toward lawyers.
Aside from the income disclosures and the plans to avoid any conflicts, Baird’s questionnaire responses trace the route of her meteoric career--from her 1974 graduation as a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, followed by graduation from UC’s Boalt Hall School of Law.
After clerking for a federal judge in San Francisco, Baird joined the Justice Department during the Jimmy Carter Administration as an attorney-adviser in the office of legal counsel, which assists the attorney general in providing legal advice for the President.
That led to her moving to the White House at the invitation of Lloyd N. Cutler, then counsel to the President and one of Washington’s most influential lawyers. Her work there included legal underpinnings for the effort to win release of U.S. hostages held by Iran.
Those connections, in turn, led to her joining the Washington office of O’Melveny & Myers, a major Los Angeles law firm headed by Warren Christopher, who as deputy secretary of state had a central role in the hostage release efforts. Christopher headed President-elect Clinton’s transition and is secretary of state-designate.
After five years at the law firm, Baird married Gewirtz and moved to Connecticut, where he taught at Yale and she became a counsel for GE, which is headquartered in the state.
At GE, Baird noted, she led efforts to carry out a voluntary program for employees to disclose possible fraud in the company’s defense contracts, which have been denounced by whistle-blower groups for actually stifling disclosure.
A spokeswoman for Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), author of the False Claims Act that spurred the development of corporate whistle-blowers, said he is “very concerned about her attitude toward the law” and plans to question her on the issue during the confirmation hearings.
