Attorneys, Defend Thyselves

She beamed, she gleamed, she charmed, she joked, she giggled. She talked tough, she talked straight.

Only when asked if she would stay in the business did Marcia Clark, renowned lead prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson criminal trial, hesitate before the enthusiastic throng of about 600, mostly female, whose members had paid $20 or $30 each to hear her speak and take questions in the Ventura County community of Thousand Oaks Thursday night. She paused a few moments, cocked her head as she often does, then replied softly: “I don’t know.”

If law is such a noble calling, why do so many lawyers want to do something else?

At least Clark’s ambivalence about resuming her career is understandable. She may still be running from the humiliating courtroom defeat that, oddly, has made her an icon to a substantial chunk of Americans represented by last week’s audience that gave her a standing ovation. To say nothing of the 100 deep pockets in attendance who paid an additional $70 for the privilege of having an intimate dessert with her afterward, as part of an event whose proceeds, minus Clark’s unspecified fee and other overhead, benefited a charity, Interface Children Family Services.

Yet what of those fattened cats on Simpson’s winning criminal defense team, the TV-blessed elite either fleeing from or realigning their legal careers to accommodate their media agenda? Recent days have found Barry Scheck joining NBC News as a legal analyst and consultant on special programs, Robert Shapiro signing with CBS News to talk about the Simpson civil trial and Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., who already had engaged in dueling books with his former ally-turned-foe Shapiro, preparing to co-host a live, nightly “Crossfire”-style talk show on Court TV with Atlanta prosecutor Nancy Grace. And don’t forget Alan Dershowitz appears weekly with former Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden on Geraldo Rivera’s CNBC series.

Although a handful of journalists and various predators have profited financially from the Simpson case, lawyers are the ones who have made it the cash cow that jumped over the moon, with them clinging to the tail.

In addition to lucrative payoffs logged by Simpson defenders outside the courtroom, the case has yielded major book and speaking contracts for Clark and Darden, with the latter also now said to be negotiating to host a “reality” TV series featuring court cases. If that collapses, Darden can always count on his deal for a movie based on his book, “In Contempt,” a volume that, in the tradition of other Simpson spinoff authors, he promoted the old-fashioned way by making the rounds of TV and radio in an odyssey of self-interest that landed him beside Howard Stern.

Meanwhile, other attorneys have expanded or earned regular gigs based on their stardom as TV pundits for the first Simpson trial, all of them helping inflate an already swollen cottage industry of legal tongues who these days do much of their wagging to a TV lens or radio mike.

Greta Van Susteren and Roger Cossack now reign over the weekday legal series “Burden of Proof” on CNN, for example. Attorney Jay Monahan is now legal consultant for MSNBC. Loyola Law School Dean Laurie Levenson is a legal consultant for CBS News. Stan Goldman, a professor at the same school, is a legal analyst for Fox News. Former Superior Court Judge Burton Katz and attorney/Simpson friend Leo Terrell parlayed their prominence as TV analysts during the first Simpson trial into a boisterous weekend radio talk show on KABC, where Gloria Allred, who has represented the family of murder victim Nicole Brown Simpson, continues to have her own regular presence.

Surely some attorneys riding this media surge hope to elevate public awareness about the law along with their personal exposure and bank accounts. Yet distinctions tend to blur in the pundit fog. Thus, as a group, all of the above tend to reinforce, in some circles, a general impression that mainly self-interest drives lawyers, and specifically those linked either directly or indirectly to the Simpson case. In other words, lawyers not chasing ambulances now chase camera crews.

Or sainthood.

“You make me very proud to be a woman,” a member of the audience told Clark after her 45-minute speech titled “Gender and Justice.” A likable, animated speaker, her message about the folly of females letting males define them, although correct, was a rehash of antique jargon that she applied to her career and the fallacy of law “being a man’s job.” A judge would have commanded her to move on to fresh testimony.

Yet others in the audience rose to deliver similar praise of Clark, the irony being that she had come to their attention and earned their affection by losing--by getting clobbered in America’s most famous criminal trial in decades. And doing so in front of millions of TV viewers as a bonus.

It’s curious who gets widely celebrated and who doesn’t. Earlier this month, The Times ran a story about Nancy Mintie, a 42-year-old Los Angeles attorney who earns $29,500 a year heading the Inner City Law Center, which for years has been fighting slumlords on behalf of the poor. As someone later wrote in a letter about the story on Mintie and her colleagues: “They are the unthanked warriors, the forgotten heroes who move life one step closer to heaven.”

Heroes who don’t rate book deals or speaking tours.

Don’t misunderstand. This is no rap of Clark, obviously a bright, capable attorney who is as entitled to financially benefit from supply and demand as anyone else, and also entitled to respect for her formidable courtroom presence in a traditionally male domain. Let’s hear it for strong women in all fields, as well as for strong men.

Yet her overly exalted status is a primer on how we often gratuitously choose icons, how someone gets anointed by virtue of the celebrity she attains through constant exposure on television. In fact, the trashy reporting that tormented her--she calls it “wildly inappropriate attention”--also helped make her the salable commodity she is today.

Clark devoted some of her evening to ridiculing several members of the Simpson criminal defense team and savaging its tactics, and agreed with a woman who was applauded when telling Clark that Judge Lance A. Ito “had it in for you.” Yes, it sounded like a pretty unfair fight.

Strange, though, that no one in the audience asked Clark about the prosecution blunders that undermined its own case. You know, the backfires that helped lead to Simpson’s acquittal, from the failed glove test to the Mark Fuhrman debacle that blew open the door to Cochran’s “race card.”

When you’re an icon, no second-guessing allowed.