Who are the lawyers behind the powerful?
The lawyers who take on these cases are people, too. Who are they, and how does their behavior ripple out to the rest of us?
Before launching a whistleblower platform a few years ago, I served as an informal intermediary between nervous sources in the tech industry with sensitive information and journalists who wanted tips. One of the first stories brought to me was about the New York City tech company Better.com.
According to a sizable group of concerned employees, the Better.com CEO Vishal Garg was likely unstable and running an abusive workplace. He showed up to the office with an toy hatchet after layoffs; referred to his employees as “dumb dolphins” and as “lazy”; and promoted an executive and showered her with stock options despite allegations that she bullied the staff. One person who I spoke with told me he questioned whether he should even exist as a human being after working for Garg, that’s how much he was made to feel worthless.
At the time, pre-pandemic, Better.com was one of the fastest-growing tech employers in New York. And while tech or labor journalists hadn’t heard of Better.com or Garg when I brought them the tip, they would know of him and report on him later on. During the pandemic, a TikTok video of Garg mass-firing 900 people over Zoom went viral. And SoftBank, never a group to shy away from “crazy” sunk $500 million into Better.com in 2021, making Garg an on-paper billionaire.
Around that time, a lawyer named Rachael Kierych and I connected. She had read somewhere that I had helped the Better.com employees tell their stories, and she was representing Vishal Garg’s former business partner, Raza Khan.
Khan sued Garg in a case that alleges, among other things, that Garg stole millions of dollars of corporate funds from their old company. (Khan’s lawsuit is one of several federal and state lawsuits against Garg currently—they are listed here, alongside a Forbes article describing Garg’s outburst in a deposition to “staple” Khan to a wall and “burn him alive.”)
It’s been a long and drawn out legal battle. After ten years, a jury unanimously awarded Khan several million dollars last summer related to Garg’s theft of corporate funds, failure to file tax returns, and falsification of the company’s financial documents. An appeal is ongoing.
A mercurial tech CEO acting rashly or aggressively is not surprising. But people like Garg are enabled and championed by someone in the legal system who will take on their case. And a case like this is expensive, with lawyers’ fees costing millions of dollars a year.
Interestingly, women’s rights lawyer and self-proclaimed bully-fighter Roberta Kaplan was one of Garg’s lawyers—as well as a man named Jason Berland, who according to his LinkedIn is currently employed at 1/0 Capital, an investment fund that has a 10% stake in Better.com.
Meanwhile, Khan’s lawyer Rachael Kierych runs her own boutique law practice and has been on the case since 2018, alongside co-counsel. She has had two pregnancies since this case has been ongoing—one high-risk—and successfully argued two trials while pregnant.
In letters to the court shared over the last few months, Berland repeatedly reprimands Kierych after her childbirth for either working too hard, or for not working hard enough. When Kierych worked on finalizing appeal documents after having been in the NICU with her newborn daughter, Berland claimed her daughter could not possibly have been in poor condition; when Kierych asked for a delay in submitting filings to take her daughter to the cardiologist, Berland (knowing at a high-level there was a major issue with her child) claimed she was slacking and being dishonest.
It’s no secret that working mothers and parents can face all kinds of complications returning to work. And the legal industry can be particularly brutal in that it requires sometimes hundred-hour weeks, with little compassion for those who can’t burn the midnight oil for their big-money clients (this leads to subsequent mental burnout or drug use, as some lawyers have told me). As another former litigator told me, the law at the end of the day is more about business than it is about justice.
The Better.com story has been out of the news for years now, and Garg has since settled with some of the employees who initially came to me. It remains to be seen what will happen with the appeal, as Berland and co try to stall and launch attacks on a postpartum mother.
But with Trump’s flurry of recent executive orders that threaten law firms, it’s interesting to trace where money is flowing to lawyers and law firms, and who the lawyers behind these cases are. What motivates someone to work dutifully for someone like Trump or Vishal Garg? (Yes, money.) But beyond that, how are the incentives in places so that lawyering for clients with the biggest pockets becomes impossible to disentangle from, and leads to a cycle of powerful people and entities acting however they wish?
Matt Stoller has an good read about how (Democratic) law firms like Paul Weiss are bending the knee to Trump, explaining their true motives in defending Google and other big-tech on antitrust issues. He writes: “The alchemy of big law was always the way in which you seamlessly revolve in and out of government - the allure of making a lot of money and governing.” And take a look at Elon Musk’s law firm Richards, Layton & Finger, or RLF, who drafted an actual bill in Delaware that if adopted could pave the way for the reinstatement of Musk’s 2018 CEO pay package at Tesla, worth tens of billions of dollars in options. More money for Musk, more money for them, so long as they can defend his practices.
The enablement of Garg (so long as he has money to pay his legal bills)—and the soulless treatment of Kierych’s childbirth by Garg’s lawyer is one small story. But I can’t help but see the bigger system at play here: a culture of hard work becoming one of incivility and ruthlessness, permeating all the judgments and systems which govern how we operate and interact with one another.
There are good lawyers out there, of course. But during this era, we shall see where people fall when pressed.
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