Steven Schectman

LEGALLY RIVETED
Spokesman Review, The (Spokane), Jun 27, 1999 by Julie Sullivan Staff writer

Steven Schectman's law firm handles suits from wrongful deaths to environmental disasters. But no matter what the case or who the client, the defendant is always the same:

Charles Hurwitz.

The head of Maxxam Inc., which owns a controlling interest in Kaiser Aluminum, is the sole target of a small but busy Northern California law firm. After 20 years of suing landlords, governments and other attorneys, Schectman's aim is "piercing the corporate veil" of Hurwitz's Maxxam and its more than 110 subsidiaries. His firm represents more than 65 people in five state and federal suits against Maxxam. Last week, Schectman won the right to depose two Kaiser executives in one of the cases against Pacific Lumber Co. The suit alleges that Pacific's logging practices caused massive landslides that swept away seven homes and damaged another eight in Stafford, Calif., and in another instance, destroyed the Elk River watershed. Schectman hopes the Kaiser depositions unravel a complex corporate structure that he claims was created to shield Hurwitz from liability. It was in another deposition in the case, with Pacific Lumber head John Campbell, that Schectman discovered more than 30 laid-off Pacific Lumber employees had been sent to Spokane to cross the Kaiser picket line after the Sept. 30 strike by the United Steelworkers. The Steelworkers allege such third-party hiring breaks state law. The Washington State Patrol is investigating. Schectman says the takeover of the California timber company and Kaiser, and their respective problems with the environment and labor, are the result of calculated corporate policies by Hurwitz, whom he calls a "predatory capitalist." Hurwitz takes over companies, drains their wealth and moves on, leaving investors, employees and communities behind, the attorney claims. "Maxxam is one of the corporations in America that most operates on the edge, if not the outside, of the law," he charges. "It's important Hurwitz be exposed and brought into the family of legally compliant corporations." Representatives for Kaiser and Maxxam say Schectman is a nuisance - an opportunist driven by the Steelworkers, who have been locked out of Kaiser plants since Jan. 14. They note that the Steelworkers had no problem with Hurwitz owning Kaiser in the 10 years prior to the dispute. The suit against Pacific Lumber has "zero connection" to Kaiser, and Kaiser has nothing to do with operations at Pacific Lumber, says Kaiser spokesman Scott Lamb. "This whole effort is to connect the dots where they don't connect," Lamb says. "This does absolutely nothing to advance the process toward a new labor agreement." Maxxam spokesman Joshua Reiss places Schectman among a cadre of trial lawyers nationwide who believe they can reap huge benefits by suing large corporations. "The allegation that (Hurwitz) is the one behind the scenes ultimately making the decisions is on its face inaccurate," Reiss says. "It's just not true." Schectman said he is not receiving any pay or travel expenses from the union. He was in Spokane last week to lend support and learn as much about Kaiser as possible. "I am going to college and graduate school on Maxxam," says the 46-year-old attorney. "My office will be the place outside Maxxam that knows the most about Maxxam, and we will be able to disassemble this entity." To 200 Spokane Steelworkers rallying at the Trentwood rolling mill gate Thursday, he was more direct. "Hurwitz is the enemy," he said. A legal bulldog "Have you seen `A Civil Action'?" San Francisco attorney Frances Pinnock asks. "That's Steven." The best-selling book and movie centers on a case brought by Jan Schlichtmann, the idealistic personal injury lawyer whose life was consumed by a suit over contaminated drinking water in East Woburn, Mass. Pinnock says her former law partner is a West Coast version of that character, a "bulldog" who'd sooner lose his law practice than quit. Schectman grew up in a two-story flat on Chicago's north side. His immigrant grandparents, Russian Jews who spoke no English, lived downstairs. His parents sold industrial staples out of the basement. Schectman earned a degree in experimental psychology at Drake University before traveling to California to begin what would be a career of activism. He worked on Tom Hayden's failed bid for the U.S. Senate, enrolled in law school in San Francisco and worked with the United Farm Workers on housing issues. At the beginning of his second year of legal studies, he met Berkeley civil rights attorney Len Holt and left school to become an apprentice. He tried his first case a week after passing the California Bar in 1980. He has since trained five other apprentices. Today, there are six apprentices in the Pacific Law office in Eureka, where he works with two other attorneys and a retired judge. But before he even took the bar exam, Schectman co-founded the Eviction Defense Center in San Francisco, helping 40 to 50 people represent themselves against landlords. Among his legal victories: a $4.3 million settlement for the wrongful eviction of 23 elderly hotel tenants. He says that in the process of trying that case, he learned how economics drives unlawful conduct. "Follow the money" soon became an official strategy, as did the outrageousness of some of Schectman's tactics. When he sued a famous San Francisco restaurant for firing a waiter because he had AIDS, Schectman organized members of the radical group ACTUP to demonstrate outside the restaurant and target patrons. The client won $30,000 but died within two weeks. When Schectman took on one of California's oldest and most prestigious law firms - Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro - for discriminating against aging secretaries, he had the older women standing on street corners handing out inflammatory leaflets. The women were terrified, he says, and the button-down firm horrified, but it was vintage Schectman. "I represent powerless people and powerless people need to experience their own power," he says. Such acts also pressure defendants to resolve the case. "People dislike me. But my job is to be disliked by the opposition. This isn't a job to me. It's who I am." During the battle, the Pillsbury attorneys countersued, saying Schectman had used documents carried out of the law firm by the former employees. Schectman lost that round and the case dragged on for months. "The case destroyed our law firm," Pinnock says. "We actually had no money. His wife was selling her jewelry." The former partners are still involved in a dispute over the collapse of the firm. But Schectman held out, completely broke, for nearly six months before winning a $4.8 million settlement for the secretaries. He and his wife toyed with going to the beach for a year with their two children. Instead, they ended up in Humboldt County, where they often camped and where he became increasingly aware of a former Pillsbury client, Charles Hurwitz. Today, from a rented Victorian, Schectman works with environmentalists and other activists, studying Hurwitz. He doesn't own his own home or office and he drives a van. Yet he's taking on a man who is No. 156 on the Fortune 500 in control of a billion-dollar conglomerate. It's a position he's used to. "We're not making cases happen," he says. "All we have to do is sit back, do our work and his victims find us."

Spokesman Review, The (Spokane)

The Spokesman Review is Spokane, Washington's over-100-year-old newspaper, and features local coverage of news, business, sports and entertainment.