91视频

(Editor’s note: This piece originally ran in the June 2, 2011, issue of the Briefly Legal PDX e-newsletter)

In March 2011, the 91视频 held its first Leadership in Law awards as a way to recognize local attorneys with more than 10 years of experience. And while the profiles we wrote at the time for each of them were interesting, we felt they left us wanting to know a little more about what really makes these legal leaders tick.This week, we talk to Ed Harnden, a managing partner at Barran Liebman in Portland.

Briefly Legal: What is one of the most amusing or unusual memories you have from law school?

Ed Harnden: While in my first year of law school in New York City, I was tutoring several youngsters in a Harlem housing project as a part of a legal aid clinic assignment. The discussion turned to the “legal” way to make another kid return property that he had taken. My advice was to first ask for its return, and then to go to the principal if that didn’t work.聽 This was met with great laughter and derision. I was told by one of fifth-grade kids in the group that the answer was much more direct: You just point a gun directly at the person’s more sensitive region and you would get results. He then quickly retrieved a gun from under his sweatshirt to show me (respectfully, he said, since I grew up on a farm) how to do it. They all then decided they had better walk me back to the subway for my ride back to campus because I obviously did not know how to protect either myself or my possessions. Tutors and teachers are very underpaid.

BL: If you could choose a fantasy career that is totally different from practicing law, what would it be?

Harnden: Even with my experiences as a tutor in college and law school, teaching would be at the top of my list. However, my daughter (who is a fantastic fifth-grade teacher) suggests that I think it would be great because I have in mind a class of 10 students (rather than the 35 she has), all of whom would hang on every brilliant word that I impart (she maintains that she is still waiting for one of them) about history and literature. So I guess it is back to fantasizing about being six feet tall and 21 years old again.

BL: In your opinion, what is the best legal movie or novel ever?

Harnden: 鈥淭o Kill a Mockingbird鈥� because of the force of a lawyer rising above the naked racism of the time to defend what was then an “undesirable” (at least in the minds of the “majority”). I suppose I also always wanted to play the role of Atticus Finch in real life, or at least be able to try a case as well as Gregory Peck.

That is followed closely by 鈥�12 Angry Men.鈥� What lawyer among us doesn’t hope that there is a lone juror that we have convinced of our cause through our oratorical brilliance, who then stands up to the rest of the unknowing. Unfortunately, it is usually that there is such a juror who we have left to figure it out for himself/herself due to our not having figured it out, and then to carry the day for us. In addition, I look exactly like Henry Fonda.