Irell Partner Loses Trial for First Time in 17 Years
A partner at Irell & Manella who once co-headed the prosecution of Enron’s top executives has lost his first trial.
It was a long time coming. John Hueston had not had a trial loss in 17 years, the Los Angeles Daily Journal (sub. req.) reports. “I guess now I’m a real trial lawyer,” Hueston told the publication in an e-mail. He joined Irell in 2006 and co-chairs its corporate crisis and white-collar criminal defense practice.
Before going into private practice, Hueston was chief of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Santa Ana, Calif., and was co-lead prosecutor of the Enron task force, according to his firm biography. A former Santa Ana colleague, Wayne Gross, praised Hueston’s trial skill in a 2006 Los Angeles Times article. “He doesn’t just win,” Gross told the newspaper. “He destroys the other side.”
Hueston has a competitive streak that led to success in high school wrestling, mountain climbing and amateur running, the Times article said.
The loss came in a California lawsuit filed on behalf of an heiress who oversaw a trust that financed her son’s multimillion-dollar investment in a limousine company that later failed. The fraud suit claimed the limo company owner had failed to disclose his firm’s adverse financial picture, the Daily Journal says.
The heiress is Ann Becher Smead, whose late husband Joseph Smead was the CEO of Kaiser Aerospace.
Hueston’s co-counsel, Irell partner Bruce Wessel, told the Daily Journal that jurors gave inconsistent answers to a question about whether Smead and her son had been misled. The lawyers are pondering their next move.
