Part 175: The LA Alliance Hearings vs. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher – Judicial Notice and Legal Fireworks

Published June 10, 2025.

and

Jun 10, 2025

Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher partner Theane Evangelis argues the Grants Pass vs. Gloria Johnson case at the United States Supreme Court (Cartoon by William Hennessy).

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By Zachary Ellison and Ruth Roofless, Independent Journalists

Few names strike more fear and respect into opponents in the legal world than the firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (GDC). They once represented Chevron in the international case brought by indigenous Ecuadorian people of the Amazon. GDC attorney Randy Mastro is famous for getting opposing counsel Steven Dozinger disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C., and incarcerated. A judge in Delaware once accused GDC of “committing fraud about fraud,” and a Montana one called them “legal thugs” on the record. Judicial notice as a principle allows a court to recognize certain facts as true without formal sources based on their notoriety.

Now employed by the City of Los Angeles in its ongoing legal battle with the LA Alliance for Human Rights, Gibson Dunn has taken the front seat before Judge David O. Carter as the non-profit LA Alliance for Human Rights has all but put the leadership of the City of Los Angeles on trial in a series of evidentiary hearings over its failures to address the crisis of the unhoused living and dying on the streets of the City of Angels. Led by attorney Theane D. Evangelis with a team by her side, the reported $900,000 ante up for a 2-year contract deployed by City Attorney Hydee Feldstein-Soto with the approval of Los Angeles City Council and presumably by the heavily scrutinized Mayor Karen Bass again raises troubling questions about the firm.

The globally famous firm recently notably represented the City of Grants Pass, Oregon, in a successful argument at the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) that allowed the criminalization of encampments nationwide. No stranger to Los Angeles, one of the firm’s former partners, former Chief Deputy City Attorney James P. Clark, still presently faces disbarment over the corruption scandal at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power more than a decade later after GDC was hired to represent billing company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

The relationship between GDC and the region’s largest municipality spans over a century, with founding partner and prominent Los Angeles real estate attorney John D. Bicknell founding the cities of Azusa and Monrovia, as well as leading the Los Angeles County Bar Association prior to the turn of the century, when his firm was called Bicknell, Trask & Gibson. There is a road in Santa Monica, a park in Monrovia, and a whole ghost town named after him in Santa Barbara County’s Orcutt oil field. Former City Attorney William Ellsworth Dunn, Assistant City Attorney Albert Crutcher, and Judge James Gibson are the original partners of the now prolific and successful firm.

Needless to say, GDC’s ties to City Hall run deep and complicated, raising profound questions about the role of the legal profession in addressing public policy issues and the meaning of conflicts of interest “COIs.” Firms in California are required to consider such COIs under State Bar Rule 1.7 before taking on new clients.

This may be the reason for the inclusion of a COI waiver with the language “Such conflicts must be directly adverse and require disclosure.” Interestingly, following last summer's ruling, Bass said about the decision to refuse to criminalize homelessness, “This ruling must not be used as an excuse for cities across the country to attempt to arrest their way out of this problem or hide the homelessness crisis in neighboring cities or in jail.” Evangelis, a partner at the firm (like Clark), boasts on her firm’s webpage about the ruling, “Assembled a broad coalition of hundreds of amici, including California Governor Gavin Newsom and dozens of cities and states across the country, and presented oral argument before the Supreme Court on behalf of Grants Pass.”

No stranger to Los Angeles, Evangelis served on the county’s Blue Ribbon Commission and is a donor to Feldstein-Soto, having given $1,500 to her 2022 election campaign in July 2022 and $1,800 to her officeholder account in October 2023. Pay-to-play?

Without alleging quid pro quo, it’s amusing to think that GDC’s contract with the city, which includes $2,650 hourly rates for partners, commits to Evangelis a “discounted” hourly wage of $1,295, meaning $3,300 would fund approximately 2.5 hours of her legal work. Comparing that to the annual income of an indigent applicant (as many like Ruth living on the streets in LA are considered) who receives general relief (“welfare”) assistance from the county’s Department of Public Social Services is <$2k/year.

Feldstein-Soto previously faced questions over her campaign donations and the selection of receiver Mark Adams to oversee 1,500 housing units from the Skid Row Housing Trust. The city’s top attorney had collected $8,500 in related donations from Adams before making the appointment. Feldstein-Soto faces a challenger, Marissa Roy, in 2026. A former deputy city attorney who works for the California Attorney General’s Office, Roy has already secured significant political support.

Another scandal for Feldstein-Soto over her selection of counsel to represent the city in the LA Alliance case would again raise questions about her judgment. Asked for comment, the City Attorney’s Office didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Evangelis’s former spouse, Teddy Kapur, previously sought election as City Attorney in 2022, coming away with 5.1% of the primary vote, a cause to which she also donated over $1,000, despite divorcing him in 2012.

The connections don’t stop there. The LA Alliance is represented by attorneys Elizabeth Mitchell and Matthew Umhofer of the firm Umhofer, Mitchell, King LLP, who were among those filing amicus briefs in the Grants Pass case. So Evangelis and the LA Alliance clearly have a relationship, but is it adverse to the interest of the client? In this case, the question becomes whether the City of Los Angeles, as represented by GDC and ultimately the City Attorney’s office, truly represents all Angelenos, including the unhoused, or simply those who want homelessness out-of-sight and out-of-mind.

In his filing on behalf of the LA Alliance, Umhofer wrote that permitting encampments to remain when inadequate shelter was available was akin to allowing the “very real and present dangers of hazardous waste, drug addiction and related criminal enterprise, fire, rape, assault, untreated illness, vermin infestation, and more—even the return of medieval disease.” Undoubtedly, these evils also exist outside of the unhoused population, who testify to worse squalor existing in shelters like horrific blood-stained family bathrooms at LA Alliance member-plaintiff Reverend Andy Bales’ Union Rescue Mission “URM.” For a time, Reverend Bales was also a member of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority “LAHSA” Commission, receiving his appointment from Alliance-aligned County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, despite URM’s location in Hilda Solis’ district. Bales has since retired out-of-state.

Backed by the business community in downtown Los Angeles and particularly billionaire Izek Shomof, who took credit for the filing of the LA Alliance lawsuit in his book Dreams Don’t Die, the group has many well-meaning supporters. Under Rule 1.7, clients can give informed consent to override a potential conflict, with the State Bar of California rules explaining the balancing act:

“Factors relevant in determining whether the clients’ informed written consent* is required include the courts and jurisdictions where the different cases are pending, whether a ruling in one case would have a precedential effect on the other case, whether the legal question is substantive or procedural, the temporal relationship between the matters, the significance of the legal question to the immediate and long-term interests of the clients involved, and the clients’ reasonable* expectations in retaining the lawyer.”

Unlike other jurisdictions, the City of Los Angeles took no side in the Grants Pass case before retaining Evangelis and GDC maintaining neutrality. Yet clearly, the decision-maker Feldstein-Soto has a “legal, business, financial, professional, or personal relationship with or responsibility to a party or witness in the same matter.” It’s unclear if other uninterested firms were considered as potential contractors for the City of Los Angeles in representing the city in the LA Alliance proceedings.

Gibson Dunn has discounted their services from $2,425 per hour for Evangelis, $2,245 for partner Marcellus McRae, $2,190 for partner Kahn Scolnick, and $2,110 for partner Bradley Hamburger, as well as all other attorneys, to a generous $1,295 per hour for representation. Scolnick serves as the 2024-2026 President of the Board of Commissioners for the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, which is an intervenor in the LA Alliance case represented by Shayla Meyers in the LA Alliance hearings. Hamburger is a member of the Federalist Society and has recently spoken last April and May on the Grants Pass case at events hosted at the ritzy University Club of San Francisco and California Club in Los Angeles. Clearly, being a lawyer litigating against the right to live in an encampment when shelter is unavailable isn’t a bad gig per se and comes with some serious professional reputational gains and political influence.

If hiring Gibson Dunn was supposed to get the City of Los Angeles out of a legal game of pickle, at least for now, despite extensive testimony, including from officials such as City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo and Deputy Mayor Etsemaye Agonafer, it’s not an instant magic trick. Judge Carter has ordered further verification of time-limited subsidies that are supposed to provide housing to those in need. Discussion had swirled around whether Mayor Bass would be compelled to testify under the threat of Carter appointing a receiver to oversee at least some elements of the city’s homelessness response. Who that person would be remains deeply unclear, even as Carter continues to put the widely agreed-upon to be struggling bureaucracy under the proverbial microscope. Clearly, the role of homelessness receiver for Los Angeles isn’t a glamorous job or one with great financial or political rewards.

The City of Los Angeles waived its conflict of interest requirement for Gibson Dunn as part of its contract. The deliberations took place in a closed session of the City Council, by a 12-0-3 vote on Council File 20-0263-S3, with absences from Councilmembers Nithya Raman, Imelda Padilla, and Adrin Nazarian. Yet Raman and Padilla were clearly present at the meeting, with Raman speaking on related issues only minutes before the doors were closed. Raman has been outspoken in opposing the criminalization of homelessness. A spokesperson for her didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the non-vote. Last summer, after the Grants Pass ruling, Raman told Bloomberg, “This is a moment where I’m seeing the impacts of what truly building out shelter and housing can look like in Los Angeles… I hope that we don’t take our eyes away from that lesson.” For now, simply getting out of a potential receivership may be the goal and preventing the LA Alliance from securing legal and political victory from Judge Carter.

Increasingly there’s the problem with what goes on inside the courtroom under Judge Carter and what goes on outside of it in realigning the powerful interests of government and private citizens. In all but outright seeking to embarrass top political leaders in Los Angeles with evidentiary hearings that have ultimately revealed little bombshell, smoking gun evidence beyond what’s already known—that the homelessness response system is struggling to meet the goal of a 60% reduction in the unsheltered population—the agreement itself has become increasingly an arbitrary legal settlement. In questioning Deputy Mayor Etsemaye Agonofer, attorney Matthew Umhofer sought to question whether she had read it. City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, a veteran of multiple administrations, spent even more time on the stand to ultimately arrive at no greater resolution of the core question of whether or not the promises made can be delivered upon. The hearings themselves are approaching becoming theater.

With the decision of Los Angeles County to all but walk away from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) to create its own response agency and a pending decision from the City of Los Angeles to do the same, whatever progress was being made is now on ice. There’s something to be said for getting the right guests in the right chair, but the decision, which forced the resignation of Dr. Va Lecia Kellum Adams from LAHSA, hasn’t immediately resulted in either her actual departure or a clear path forward to better results. LAHSA isn’t even actually a direct party to the agreement.

Nor is it even clear if the recommendations of a year-plus-long audit by Alvarez & Marsal will be formally adopted. The question of what happens next is most interesting, with Judge Carter remarking on June 4 with Special Master Michele Martinez on the stand under question about her salary and her role in a potential reform plan that he thought attorney Angelique Kaounis of Gibson Dunn was “getting into a very interesting territory because I surrounded myself with people who didn't accept payment for many years, almost seven years before, to make sure they were virtuous.”

Martinez, the apparent second choice by the LA Alliance to be the receiver and no longer a monitor who had overseen the A&M audit, all but seemingly shot down the idea she would accept such an appointment as the Alliance had suggested in the filing. The question of who exactly would be the receiver should Judge Carter order it remains more vexing than ever, with Carter stating puzzlingly, “That assumes a receivership and also includes the monitor within the receivership.” Kaounis, in her effort to discredit Martinez as an arbiter of whether the city had breached the agreement, went as far as to ask Martinez about her past political record.

Asking boldly before the courtroom, “In fact, you were personally criticized by the Orange County political press for what was described as a shocking pattern of living large at the public's expense, raising questions whether you had violated governmental travel policies, state disclosure rules, or state ethics laws; correct?” Kaounis is a partner at Gibson Dunn, and it wasn’t clear that Martinez had anticipated the attack on her credibility. It left Carter defending Martinez, “And also, the Court's screening and confidence in her, and the engagement that the next person or entity was recommended at $700 an hour for a pro bono rate.” Have the tables finally turned in the City of Los Angeles?

In the end, the LA Alliance evidentiary hearings, at least according to Matthew Umhofer, amounted to the potential end of the settlement in June 2027, with him describing the testimony of Matt Szabo as amounting to being “preposterous,” describing the position as one in which “the city insists that it's enough that the city truly believes that it'll get there by 2027.” Umhofer described a series of “bad arguments” as being the position of the City of Los Angeles in regard to the LA Alliance settlement.

One thing is for sure, it will take more than an exchange of legal firepower to begin addressing the human crisis on its streets effectively. Despite all this, there are no clear signs of any coordinated, comprehensive reform plan to improve outcomes. Not even money can seemingly make the difference in an increasingly apparent leadership deficit that goes beyond even Karen Bass or Va Lecia Kellum Adams at best.

Link: LA hires big law firm — at $900,000 — in long-running court battle over homelessness spending

Link: Rule 1.7 Conflict of Interest: Current Clients

Link: Mayor Bass Slams Supreme Court’s Ruling To Allow Failed Homeless Policies Across The Nation

Link: Blue Ribbon Commission on Homelessness

Link: L.A. attorney admits her pick for Skid Row receiver was a fail. But she doesn’t want to talk about the $8,500

Link: Marissa Roy for City Attorney

Link: Umhofer, Mitchell, & King LLP Amicus Brief Grants Pass

Link: LA Alliance for Human Rights Amicus Brief Grants Pass

Link: Dreams Don't Die by Izek Shomof

Link: Gibson Dunn - Los Angeles Contract C-201616

Link: Board of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles

Link: Bradley Hamburger Federalist Society