THE NEW YORK TIMES
"FRIEND OF THE COURT: One Lawyer's Inside Track; Cozying Up to Judges, and Reaping Opportunity" By KEVIN FLYNN AND ANDY NEWMAN
Published: November 11, 2003
Ravi Batra practices the kind of law that does not come with steno pools or 40th-floor conference rooms with views of Central Park.
His office is in a brick building in a section of Manhattan known as Little India.
His legal pedigree is respectable but unremarkable.
His clients tend to be small companies or people who have been hurt in accidents.
Yet for much of the past decade Mr. Batra has been a particularly potent force in the clubby corridors of New York City courthouses.
He played a role in picking State Supreme Court judges.
Lawyers seeking an edge in the unfamiliar world of Brooklyn courts hired him as their guide.
Judges who controlled court appointments -- where lawyers typically manage the assets and welfare of the elderly, the young or of troubled companies -- gave him 150 of these, worth more than $500,000 in fees.
Mr. Batra's success was fashioned in part from long hours and legal dexterity.
But by many accounts it was built on his keen appreciation for an unspoken truth: that whom you know in courthouse circles can be just as valuable as what you know.
And Mr. Batra developed a particular knack for getting to know judges and the politicians who made them. He invited them to dinner and his home.
He toasted them at parties.
He made the Brooklyn Democratic Party boss a member of his law firm.
And the boss, Assemblyman Clarence Norman Jr., put him on the panel that screened Democratic nominees for Supreme Court judgeships, a powerful position since the nomination is tantamount to election in heavily Democratic Brooklyn.
''He's very well known,'' said Justice Reinaldo E. Rivera of the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, when asked how Mr. Batra came to offer welcoming remarks at his swearing-in ceremony last year.
''Everybody knows Mr. Batra.'' Indeed, a review of Mr. Batra's cases and interviews with judges and lawyers who know him provide a glimpse into a seldom seen corner of the court system where cozy relationships can play defining roles in who becomes a judge and who benefits from the decisions that judges make.
In Mr. Batra's case, he took the tried and true tools of networking -- schmoozing, flattery, mutual back-scratching -- and practiced them to an extent that tended to blur, or even ignore, the boundaries between the bench and the bar.
Judges who were his friends, or who visited his house or who joined him for dinner, gave him appointments or presided over cases in which he had a stake, according to court records.
Twice he was awarded fees that state monitors later found unusually high.
In one instance, defendants who paid Mr. Batra $225,000 to settle his own civil suit said they never realized he knew the judge in the case as well as he did. When Collegiality Tests Integrity Of course, in some New York political and legal circles, the suggestion that a simple meal between legal professionals could undermine a judge's integrity seems naïve.
Certainly, Mr. Batra thinks so.
''The collegial meeting of lawyers on both sides of the aisle with the bench is an absolute plus to the functioning of the profession,'' Mr. Batra said in an interview.
The judges in Mr. Batra's cases said in interviews that their decisions were made on the merits, and that Mr. Batra received no favors.
For his part, Mr. Batra likened his behavior to that of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used to play cards with Supreme Court justices, he said, only to have them overturn his legislation several days later.
''If you're a person of integrity, the question ends there,'' he said.
''And if you're not a person of integrity, all the appearances in the world don't give you integrity."
"So I prefer substantive integrity than apparent integrity.''
But experts say faith in the courts is built on such appearances.
Several years ago, after the fallout from one of Mr. Batra's appointments, state officials decided to explore whether such appointments were controlled by politics.
Their 2001 report found the system awash in cronyism.
''Many of the recipients of multiple and lucrative appointments in guardianship cases had connections to judges, political parties or court-system personnel,'' it said, ''raising concerns that they were selected based on factors other than merit.''
Mr. Batra's name has surfaced again this year as District Attorney Charles J. Hynes of Brooklyn investigates the culture of the borough's courthouse.
Prosecutors have subpoenaed Mr. Batra's business records.
They have sent a cooperating witness into a meeting with him, wearing a concealed recording device, to discuss whether money can influence the judicial selection process.
Nothing incriminating came from the tape, and Mr. Batra, 48, said he did not believe the conversation touched on such matters.
His lawyer, Randy M. Mastro, said he has been told that Mr. Batra, who has met voluntarily with prosecutors, is not a target of the investigation.
The uproar, however, has taken a toll. Mr. Batra resigned from the screening panel.
Mr. Norman, who was indicted several weeks ago on unrelated larceny charges, left Mr. Batra's law firm.
And in a severe indignity to a man who thrives on access, the chief judge in Brooklyn, Ann T. Pfau, told other judges that she will not take calls from Mr. Batra.
Such scrutiny of how Brooklyn picks its judges would most likely not have arisen if the candidates approved by the screening panel had been uniformly good.
But in the past two years, four Brooklyn judges serving in the Supreme Court, the state's highest trial court, have gotten into trouble, including two who were charged with taking bribes. Mr. Batra did not come by his political connections easily, as either the son of a judge or the protégé of a political leader.
He was born in India and grew up in Queens.
He graduated from Pace University and Fordham Law School, taught at Pace for a number of years and practiced law, often with a certain flair.
Court submissions might be sprinkled with florid language or exclamation points.
His stationery was emblazoned with his initials set against the background of a golden eagle. His job at Pace ended in 1986 when the university did not renew his contract.
He filed a discrimination suit but lost, at trial and on appeal.
The appellate judge described his filings as ''raving and often incomprehensible.''
But over time, Mr. Batra, a man with the practiced grace of a professional diplomat, built his contacts.
He served on scholarly panels, joined the Jewish Lawyers Guild and the Puerto Rican Bar Association, among other groups, and relied on a personality that people describe as charming or, well, forward.
In particular, he showered attention on judges.
He praised them in letters to newspapers.
He invited them to his Christmas parties.
As an official of several bar associations, he ran affairs where judges were given Judicial Sunshine Awards -- his own creation.
The court in his lexicon was ''the Cathedral of Justice'' and judges were ''jewels in the crown.'' ''Each judge that appoints you places his robes in your hands for safekeeping,'' Mr. Batra said.
For lawyers and judges, the sharing of cocktails and canapés at bar association dinners has long been a fact of courthouse life.
But Mr. Batra, according to several judges, pressed for a rare level of familiarity.
He roamed the Supreme Court like it was his country club, they said, at times visiting judges unannounced in their chambers, or parking his car, with permission, in the courthouse's reserved lot.
Some judges felt uncomfortable.
Justice Michael L. Pesce recalled the first time he met Mr. Batra.
The lawyer greeted him, he said, by kissing him on both cheeks. One justice, Milton Mollen, who has since retired, said Mr. Batra invited him to dinner at his home 10 years ago.
Several days later, Mr. Mollen began receiving calls from other judges, he said, telling him that they would be at the ''birthday party'' Mr. Batra was giving for him.
Mr. Mollen said he thought he was being used and told people not to go.
But he drove to Mr. Batra's home in New Rochelle.
''I told him off and left,'' he said.
Mr. Batra denied Mr. Mollen's account and said the judge had helped to plan the event.
An Appointment to Screen Judges In 1995, Mr. Batra reinforced his most important political relationship by adding Mr. Norman to his two-person law firm.
Mr. Norman's chief function, Mr. Batra said, was handling ''introductions'' that might result in new business.
Last year, Mr. Norman made $52,000 from the firm.
This year, as part of his salary, the monthly payments on his $80,000 Mercedes Benz were paid by Mr. Batra.
After he joined the firm, Mr. Norman appointed his boss to the Democratic screening panel for judges.
Mr. Norman says he picked Mr. Batra because he is a good lawyer, an opinion that other allies of Mr. Batra share. ''He has a very fertile legal mind and thinks, as we say, outside the box,'' said Martin W. Edelman, president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association.
Nonetheless, Mr. Batra came to be viewed largely as Mr. Norman's surrogate on a panel that critics contend rubber-stamped the party's favored candidates, using criteria that had more to do with campaign contributions than legal acumen. ''There was a total lack of transparency to the process that allowed the public to lose confidence that competence, credentials and integrity were being evaluated in an independent way,'' said City Councilman Lewis A. Fidler of Brooklyn.
Mr. Batra's popularity as a court appointee picked up drastically after he became affiliated with Mr. Norman in 1995, although more than half the assignments came from Manhattan judges.
Yet some of the judges who selected him were hardly strangers.
Some had dined with him or been honored at parties he organized.
Good judges, Mr. Batra said, ''make an appointment to a person they know and trust and know the job can be done rather than look one up through the Yellow Pages.''
A few times, Mr. Batra said, he made calls on judges' behalf when they sought promotions, but only because they were worthy.
In 1998, for example, Mr. Batra said he tried to help an acting Supreme Court judge, Harold Tompkins, win a permanent spot by calling the Manhattan Democratic leader, Assemblyman Herman D. Farrell Jr.
In the preceding 18 months, Justice Tompkins had given Mr. Batra 10 appointments worth more than $85,000. Mr. Farrell denied that such a call took place.
Justice Tompkins, now retired, said he did not know of any such call.
Among Mr. Batra's closest friends on the bench, according to interviews, has been Justice Richard D. Huttner in Brooklyn, who has given him 11 appointments.
In 1999, Justice Huttner was one of the judges honored at a $250-a-head dinner that Mr. Batra organized at the Harmonie Club in Manhattan.
A year earlier, the judge had appointed Mr. Batra to oversee the troubled Cypress Hills Cemetery on the Queens-Brooklyn border as its receiver.
In that capacity, Mr. Batra set off a storm in 1999 when, citing their fees, he fired the cemetery's existing lawyers, two politically connected men like himself, and appointed his own firm in their place.
The lawyers wrote to Democratic leaders complaining that their years of loyalty had been disregarded.
Their letter's acknowledgment that appointments typically went to the politically connected had immediate impact.
State investigators began looking into courthouse patronage.
The state attorney general's office asked that Mr. Batra be removed as the cemetery's receiver. Justice Huttner resisted for weeks before removing Mr. Batra as receiver, but retaining him as the receiver's lawyer.
He resisted again when the attorney general sought in May 2000 to have Mr. Batra completely removed from the case.
The judge said Mr. Batra had done nothing wrong.
But Mr. Batra on his own decided to step down.
The next day, the lawyer and the judge met socially over drinks at a restaurant in the judge's Manhattan apartment building.
The next month, they were back together in court.
This time, Mr. Batra was representing Clarence Norman's father, who was closing his home for the mentally ill.
Should Justice Huttner have disclosed their relationship in court, given their friendship?
Mr. Batra said no.
The judge did not return calls seeking comment.
But it is the kind of question that has arisen in situations where relationships develop between lawyers and judges.
Perceptions of Partiality The rules that govern judicial conduct are broad in scope.
They instruct judges to make sure they do not allow their social and political relationships to create a perception of partiality.
But just such a perception has arisen in a case where Mr. Batra was friendly with the judge. The case, in 1994, concerned a fall Mr. Batra said he had from a swivel chair in his office.
He sued the Brooklyn company that sold him the chair.
He said the fall had left him with herniated disks, loss of height, worn-down teeth, heart damage and frustration and anger that ''leaks out in certain relationships,'' according to court papers.
He sought $80 million -- for his suffering, but also for a patio bar and a game room with table-tennis and air-hockey tables ''to permit activity without injury or waste of travel time,'' the papers said.
The case was assigned to acting Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Diane A. Lebedeff, someone with whom Mr. Batra became friendly.
While she was hearing the case, they occasionally shared a meal, according to interviews.
More significant, she gave him several court appointments, including a 1999 case that state investigators found troubling.
In that case, the judge asked Mr. Batra to evaluate whether a wealthy 94-year-old woman with Alzheimer's disease needed a financial guardian.
Mr. Batra charged $400 an hour for his work, nearly double the usual rate, state investigators found.
And when he determined the woman did need a guardian, Justice Lebedeff gave him that post, too, with the family's consent.
All told, he made $84,753 in fees paid from the woman's assets.
The investigators noted that he charged $100 for each of 80 short phone calls and never listed their subject matter.
Eight lawyers involved in the swivel-chair case say that Justice Lebedeff never told them about these appointments. Leonard Chipkin, a lawyer who represented the furniture store's insurer, said she should have.
''In any personal injury case, credibility is an issue,'' he said.
''If I make a motion challenging the credibility of the plaintiff and I've got a judge who trusts this man with a great deal of money, that's something that I would have wanted to know.''
In an interview, Justice Lebedeff defended her conduct as appropriate and impartial.
She said she could not recall whether she had disclosed the appointments in court or whether she needed to.
''If I had thought it was appropriate to do so, I would have done it,'' she said.
Mr. Batra said the judge did not need to disclose the appointments because the lawyers knew about the relationship, having sat in a hearing about the woman's case in court one day.
Mr. Batra ultimately won a settlement in the swivel-chair case after six years.
Defense lawyers said his case was helped by several orders from Justice Lebedeff -- one of which was overturned by appellate judges who said Justice Lebedeff had not objectively reviewed the history of the case.
Mr. Batra said the defendants paid him $225,000.
The facts, he said, were simply on his side. ''The impartiality of the court process,'' Mr. Batra said, ''substantively cannot be toyed with.''
Correction: November 22, 2003, Saturday Because of an editing error, a front-page article on Nov. 11 about Ravi Batra, a Manhattan lawyer who has been an influential figure within the Brooklyn courts, misstated the retirement status of a judge, Milton Mollen, at the time Mr. Batra organized a party for him, under circumstances that the two men dispute.
The judge had retired several years earlier; he was no longer on the bench.
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