Los Angeles Lawyer Is in Spotlight

William Ginsburg strode into an appeals court in an oddly advantageous situation: The cancer patient suing a hospital that the Los Angeles attorney represented had died the night before.

Ginsburg had successfully defended a Glendale hospital in a lower court against the high-stakes $10-million lawsuit filed by an agonizingly ill patient who complained that the facility refused to ease his pain by letting him perish.

After the patient died, Ginsburg could have easily had the case dismissed. But drawing on the same sense of old-fashioned ethics that he has used in representing former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, Ginsburg refused to accept an easy victory.

He told the California appeals court that the legal questions were so important that they should still be decided. But Ginsburg’s side lost, and the 1986 case wound up helping establish the foundation for a patient’s right to die.

“He had an opportunity to get his clients right out of it, and he took the high road,” said Griffith Thomas, the opposing attorney.

That sense of ethics will be challenged as Ginsburg finds himself in a case with no clear high road: representing the 24-year-old who is alleged to have lied under oath about having sex with President Clinton.

Ginsburg is not the usual insider in baroque Beltway power plays. He was called in to replace a Washington regular because he is a longtime friend of Lewinsky’s father, a Brentwood oncologist whom Ginsburg has represented for about 25 years.

The 54-year-old career defense attorney has tried more than 200 cases and is most accustomed to the workings of complex medical procedures and product liability. Yet Southern California peers say Ginsburg can hold his own.

“He’s a brilliant man,” said Melanie Blum, an Orange County plaintiff’s attorney. “He’s a very, very skilled negotiator. Monica Lewinsky’s in good hands.”

Ginsburg was called into the case after investigators for White House Independent Counsel Kenneth W. Starr interrogated Lewinsky for several hours at an Arlington, Va., hotel. At issue is whether Lewinsky made false statements under oath when she denied having an affair with Clinton and whether she was encouraged by the president or his advocate to lie.

Ginsburg has impressed many observers with his command and eloquence but has drawn mixed reviews from others, who question whether he erred in advising Lewinsky to reject Starr’s offer of immunity on Jan. 16.

Some question whether Ginsburg’s relative inexperience in criminal defense work contributed to his indecision.

“You can’t get anything better than full immunity,” said Joseph E. diGenova, a former U.S. attorney. “He appears not to have known what to do.”

Plato Cacheris, a defense lawyer who once obtained immunity for Fawn Hall, who was Oliver L. North’s White House secretary, faulted Ginsburg for granting so many television interviews.

“I think Ginsburg should be making himself more familiar with [the evidence] instead of spending so much time on television,” Cacheris said.

Arriving on a flight from LAX to Dulles last week, Ginsburg was met by a phalanx of reporters, and has seldom been out of range of a television microphone.

He is staying at the exclusive Cosmos Club on Massachusetts Avenue, where cameramen have been staked outside to record his comings and goings--a far cry from the quiet, tree-lined Sherman Oaks street where his two-story home is located.

Sometimes, Ginsburg seems to revel in celebrity, tossing out one-liners. When a Los Angeles Times reporter laughed at one of his quips, he responded: “You like that? Good. I’ll keep using it.”

Ginsburg is used to the spotlight, just a softer one than he is in now.

The 1986 right-to-die case drew national media attention, as did Ginsburg’s defense of a doctor in the sudden on-court death of Loyola-Marymount basketball star Hank Gathers in 1990. He also represented Liberace’s physician, who was accused of obscuring the nature of the entertainer’s death from AIDS. The doctor was never charged.

Those who know Ginsburg doubt he will be seduced by the newfound publicity. “If you look at him on TV and look at some of those lawyers who have been on ‘Geraldo’ he’s very low-key,” Thomas said. “But not upstairs. His mind is working before his lips are.”

Former client Los Angeles physician Michael Mellman, who was sued after examining Gathers just before his death, calls Ginsburg “a take-charge kind of guy in very difficult situations.”

Ginsburg allayed Mellman’s fears during the legal firestorm, meeting with him 12 times to map out strategy before Mellman was dropped from the suit.

Some who have seen Ginsburg in court say his style is measured but forceful, fueled by a hungry intellect that rapidly absorbs and synthesizes information. His specialty of medical malpractice requires him to master technical issues that fill pages of medical textbooks.

“He has a tremendous ability to focus on the heart of the issues,” said George Stephan, one of Ginsburg’s Beverly Hills partners.

A Philadelphia native, Ginsburg received his undergraduate degree from UC Berkeley in 1964 and graduated from USC Law School in 1967. He helped open the Los Angeles office of a large Houston law firm specializing in medical malpractice and product liability, and defended doctors as well as pool manufacturers and spas.

Eventually, Ginsburg and three colleagues opened Ginsburg, Stephan, Ohringer & Richman in a Beverly Hills high-rise, a law firm that specializes in medical malpractice and civil litigation.

While he is well-known in the insular field of medical malpractice law and lectures on malpractice liability issues, even in hometown Los Angeles Ginsburg is not publicly known as one of the city’s heavyweight defense attorneys.

A Los Angeles County deputy district attorney who specializes in medical cases says he has only faced Ginsburg once and that he was not especially memorable.

Whatever his critics say, Ginsburg does know the complex legal dance of the deposition, which has played a crucial role in the case.

In an article on how to prepare for depositions he wrote for a legal journal, Ginsburg counseled that they are the crux of any case.

“Even in the worst of cases, where liability seems relatively simple . . . a series of good depositions of witnesses can enhance your ability to maintain ‘damage control,’ . . . “ he wrote. “The deposition is the most important aspect of trial preparation and should be treated just that way.”

Times staff writers Robert L. Jackson, Ronald J. Ostrow, Richard A. Serrano and David Willman in Washington and Daniel Yi in Los Angeles contributed to this report.