Phil Schnayerson / Louis Goodman – Transcript

Louis Goodman / Phil Schnayerson – Transcript

https://www.lovethylawyer.com/phil-schnayerson-chairman-of-the-board/

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to the Alameda County Bar Association and the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. I’m your host, Louis Goodman. Today, we welcome Phil Schnayerson to the podcast. For those of us who practice in Alameda County, Phil needs no introduction. And he was one of my first interviews on this podcast. Phil came to Alameda County as a public defender in 1969 and practiced there during the Vietnam War demonstrations in the late 60s and early 1970s.
In the 1980s, he defended the legendary punk rock group the Dead Kennedys. That trial has now been made into a play premiering in Los Angeles and Phil will be there for a question and answer session. Phil, we have a few questions for you right here, right now. So welcome to the Love Thy Lawyer podcast and the Alameda County Bar Association.
[00:01:02] Phil Schnayerson: Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure.
[00:01:05] Louis Goodman: It’s a pleasure to have you and it’s a pleasure to see you on the podcast. We managed to see each other once in a while outside of the podcasting world. And I know where you’re speaking to us from right now, because I can see what’s behind you, but maybe you could tell the rest of us where you are speaking to us from.
[00:01:23] Phil Schnayerson: Oh, I have my office in Hayward and I’ve been here in this office for almost 40 years. At the time that I got this office, the court was right across the street. Now, of course, it’s half in Oakland, half in Dublin, but I’m known in Hayward. So I remained here rather than move my office.
[00:01:43] Louis Goodman: And there’s also like a little sliver in Baja Alameda County in the Fremont court.
[00:01:49] Phil Schnayerson: Yes, there is. And it’s indeed a sliver.
[00:01:55] Louis Goodman: Phil, you have been interviewed on this podcast before, so I don’t want to go over too much that we’ve already gone through, but I’m wondering if you could briefly tell us about your education, where you went to high school, college, law school.
And just a little bit about your experience growing up and going to school and becoming a lawyer.
[00:02:17] Phil Schnayerson: Well, I grew up in an industrial city in New Jersey, Patterson, New Jersey, was actually a city founded by Alexander Hamilton. It’s about 18 miles west of New York, and it had a falls that was the largest fall east of the Mississippi, with the exception of Niagara.
And so it was used as an industrial base for weaving, and it became a city known for fabric. My grandfather, who emigrated, was a cutter. He cut patterns. So that’s where he settled in the, probably in the teens. And then I was born. My father lived there. And I was, of course, brought up in that town.
Went to Rutgers, which was the state university of New Jersey, went to law school at NYU, and then came to California as a Vista volunteer, which was the domestic peace corps and helped set up a bail project.
It still exists in San Francisco. It’s a San Francisco OR project. That’s basically how I got here. And after witnessing the weather in California, as opposed to New Jersey, I said, I’m staying. And that’s exactly what I did.
[00:03:23] Louis Goodman: I don’t want to go too deeply into your education, but I’m wondering if you could share with us the story about your admission into Rutgers and then your discussion with the Dean upon your graduation?
[00:03:36] Phil Schnayerson: You know, too much about me. All right. Well, what happened was I graduated in February. And so I had some months to work and I hadn’t planned really on going to college. All of my friends were essentially blue collar kids, and most of them went into the Navy or got married.
I had no deferment from the draft so I decided I would work for a while and then figure out what I wanted to do. And I wanted to work in a corrugated container company. And It was brutal work, really, and I definitely didn’t want that to be my career. So I went down to the State University, went in to see the admissions director, and his name was Dr. Kramer. I will never forget that. And I said, I would like to go to school here. And he said, well, I’m looking at your transcript, Mr. Schnayerson. He said, you know, your SATs are quite good, but your deportment is terrible. You were kicked out of school on two separate occasions, once for trying to blow the door off between the girls and boys dressing room.
And now I think I’d get arrested for it because it was the use of cherry bombs. But he says, what, what makes you think you can do this work? And I said, well, no, I’m serious now. I think I want to go to college. I worked in a factory and I think I’d like to do something different. And he says, well, he says, we’re supposed to let people in who have potential.
You do have potential, but I don’t think you’ll make it. We let in 1500 freshmen. We’ve flunked out about seven, half of them, about 750. Within the first two years, I don’t expect you to graduate. I’d be interested in knowing if you do. Well, I did graduate. I graduated with honors and I saw him as I crossed the campus to go to my baccalaureate and I went up to him and I said, Dr. Kramer, I want you to know you told me this, this, and that, and here I am. And I’ve graduated with honors. And he looked at me and said, Oh, I, I tell that to all the kids, but for four years, it motivated me.
[00:05:36] Louis Goodman: When did you first start thinking about being a lawyer and how did that come about?
[00:05:41] Phil Schnayerson: My dad was a pharmacist. My uncle was a lawyer and he had a case involving the invention of, or the manufacturing of streptomycin. And he became fairly wealthy after that. And so it was around and I, he had gone to NYU law school and I had talked to him a little bit while I was considering going to college and while I was in college, and I thought it sounded like people respected him and that it earned him a very good living and he was happy with the work he did, as opposed to my dad who hated what he did. And so when it came time after I graduated, well, I guess my senior year, that considering what to do and the fact that I would be drafted unless I went on to do graduate work. I decided to apply to NYU and NYU is probably the wealthiest law school in the country.
And they had given me money to go to school. And that was very enticing. It wasn’t that expensive given what they charge now, but it was a big deal. And so I decided to go to law school and I loved the fact that it was in New York city. I loved the fact that it was in the village. It was an exciting time to be in New York.
I think almost any time is probably exciting to be in New York, but it was a particularly exciting time to be in New York. It was in the early sixties. There was a lot going on. The coffee shops, the coffee houses, the music, the folk music, all of it. And it was all around. And, you know, New York may have 10 million people and probably a third of them must be between the ages of 18 and 26.
And I happened to be within that age bracket. So it was a very wonderful experience. And I loved law school and I enjoyed the teachers at NYU. They were very exciting. And that’s how I came to that profession. Now, what I was going to do with it, I had no idea. I had no plan on becoming a corporate lawyer or this lawyer or that.
I just felt that law school was a very good way to end a liberal arts education. And also I felt it was a ticket to a good living and exciting, and it has proved to be so.
[00:07:55] Louis Goodman: Can you kind of walk us through your legal career, what you did when you first got out of law school and briefly, bring us right up to the present in the practice that you have right now.
[00:08:07] Phil Schnayerson: Well, after law school, I came to California to set up the San Francisco bail project and help the other Vista volunteers do so. I was one of the few who was a lawyer. And after the first year they put me in support, a support position for other VISTA volunteer projects specifically in a geographical area, Northern California, West Nevada, Northern Arizona.
And I did that for a year and it gave me the opportunity to travel in those areas, you know, I had never been to Northern Arizona. I had never been to an Indian reservation. I hadn’t been to some of the rural counties in California. And there was a lot going on. Also in Visalia, there were projects to help some of the migrant farmers.
It was an eye opener for me. After that, I decided I would take the California bar because I wanted to remain in California. And I think I took it in August of 67. And I didn’t find out about the results until December. And I got married about a week or so. I had planned, I was living with somebody and I had planned to get married.
And she’s still my wife after 57 years. And we got married and went to Europe and spent all the money that we received as gifts, but it was fun. And, and we were in Europe probably for, I’d say three months. When I came back, I had to start looking for a job. And I literally wrote almost every law firm in San Francisco, and I received an offer from a couple of them.
The one I went with did mostly labor law and insurance defense. And all I can say is that year, and I was with them for a full year. It was the clock moved backwards. I was so bored, but I had become friendly with Mike Belachi, who was, of course, a judge here in Alameda County. But not at the time, at the time he was a practicing lawyer, we used to go hiking, backpacking, our families were friendly.
And Mike told me that he had started off as a DA in Contra Costa County and then as a public defender in Alameda County. He was now in private practice, but he knew the people in the Public Defender’s Office. And so I interviewed with the then Public Defender, John Nunes, and they offered me a job. And I think at the time there were maybe 20 public defenders.
And there, there was a fourth amendment at the time. And it was a wonderfully exciting practice. There were really wonderful people in that office and it was, well, it’s not that much different than it is today. The offices were not enemies. They were congenial with each other. And they fought like hell in court, but they were friendly out of court.
And I did that probably until maybe the mid seventies. And they, at the time they were starting the State Public Defender’s Office. And I was asked by the State Public Defender to join their office. And I was getting a little stale as a public defender. I was starting to repeat assignments, and I felt there was, I should do something different.
There were not…
[00:11:21] Louis Goodman: Phil, what’s the difference between the State Public Defender and a county Public Defender?
[00:11:26] Phil Schnayerson: The State Public Defender at the time did criminal appeals for indigents and took on trials that came out of crimes committed within the state prison system. The AG would do the prosecuting, the State Public Defender would do the defense, and I had the area that included Vacaville, San Quentin, Folsom, and Soledad, and if crimes were committed in those prisons, I got to do the defense part, and the AG got to do the prosecuting, and I thought it would be depressing at first, but it was very exciting. It was really fun stuff.
[00:12:06] Louis Goodman: How did you get into private practice?
[00:12:08] Phil Schnayerson: Well, after about two years, I was asked by the firm, which included Penny Cooper, I think Jim Newhouse, who had been our partner was leaving to go to Monterey County and they needed somebody and I started practicing in Hayward with Bob Lyons, who was Penny’s partner at the time.
And after about two years of that, I said, there was really no reason for me not to go into private practice, which I did. And I was in actually the same building I’m currently in, and there was another private lawyer who was there, and we formed a partnership that lasted for about 40 years.
[00:12:41] Louis Goodman: You’ve been practicing law for quite some time.
[00:12:45] Phil Schnayerson: Yes.
[00:12:46] Louis Goodman: Since 1969, at least in Alameda County.
[00:12:51] Phil Schnayerson: True.
[00:12:51] Louis Goodman: Obviously there are a lot of things that you could do and you’ve chosen to practice law and you’ve chosen to stay practicing law, and I’m wondering, what is it about the practice of law and perhaps specifically about the practice of criminal law that you do that you enjoy, and that keeps you as an attorney.
[00:13:12] Phil Schnayerson: Well, I’ve seen, and you and I, I think I’ve talked about this before, there is an excitement in the criminal courts especially. The criminal lawyers are actually very decent to each other on a personal basis. I’ve always maintained that criminal lawyers are very civil to each other and civil lawyers are criminal to each other.
But the young lawyers, the young public defenders, the young prosecutors, the action that goes on between the two parties, plus the court has always been enjoyable to me. The judges that we started with in the sixties and seventies were men who had a lot, and mostly men. There were very few women, by the way, on the courts, there were very few women in the law schools.
There were very few women practicing law. It’s much different now, but it’s the same in this sense. We like each other and we respect each other and we’re not trying to always get over on each other, that there’s a process to what we do. And it’s enjoyable to actually talk about current things with, whether it’s the law or even current events with the people who work in the courts and who have gone to law school and are the lawyers.
They’re good people and I like seeing them and talking to them. I think that if I were to retire right now, you know, I can ride a bike and I do often, but how many bike rides can I take, but getting up in the morning, knowing that I have a place to go and that I can do something for some of my clients, and being able to do it with people that I’m interested in talking to has kept me going, and I don’t dislike it. I think there are people who practice law who hate to walk into a courtroom. I think there are people who are practicing law, and it could be the type of law, who hate doing the work. I’ve never hated doing the work.
[00:15:08] Louis Goodman: If a young person were just coming out of college, thinking about law as a career choice, would you recommend that they do that?
[00:15:14] Phil Schnayerson: I think I probably would, I think that it is, as I said, law school itself puts a nice a coda to a liberal arts education. I mean, if you’re specifically gone to engineering school and then want to be a patent lawyer, that’s a different bag.
But being a lawyer for me, especially doing criminal defense, as I said, has always been interesting and I of course would recommend it. Unless they have some passion in a different field, whether it’s astrophysics or, you know, doing work on, for in construction, you know, they’re, it’s open. Law school gives you an opening to go be a lawyer or not be a lawyer.
And so I think it’s just a very good education, but I think that if you decide you’re going to be a lawyer and you pick a field that you’re interested in, it can really fascinate you for years. And that’s why I would recommend people who are coming out of law school look around, find where they belong and dig into it.
So I would recommend.
[00:16:18] Louis Goodman: What do you think is the best advice you’ve ever received? And what advice would you give to a young attorney just starting out? And you could answer either part of the question any way you want.
[00:16:30] Phil Schnayerson: I think that the best advice I ever got was from one of the public defenders who said to me that I should enjoy what I do.
I should try and do the best I can for my clients, and that if the chips fall against you, which they do for the most part against criminal defense lawyers, keep going, don’t get depressed, because as you well know, you’ve been both a prosecutor and a defense attorney, and you know that there’s a big difference in what the expectation is on the issue of winning or losing, I consider to win when I have improved on what has occurred.
I mean, it’s not really whether a person’s guilty or innocent normally, normally it’s what can, what is to be done with this person and you try and prevent the damage. And that’s what I was told by a public defender when I first entered the field. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. And I think if I were advising somebody, I would tell them the same thing.
Don’t expect to win every case, but expect to try your best in every case. And do it. And I’ve tried to do that. The fire is still in my belly.
[00:17:46] Louis Goodman: What sort of recreational pursuits do you have to kind of take your mind off of the practice of law every once in a while?
[00:17:55] Phil Schnayerson: Uh, well, bike riding, of course, I’m still an avid bike rider.
I’d say that, especially in the summer, I’m on my bike at least four to five days a week, or I’m in a gym or some sort of a bike, but I do a lot of reading. Okay. My kids are now grown. And so I actually like some of the stuff that’s on TV recently. I think the streaming channels on TV have given a whole new, new programs on TV that far are far better than what we had in the sixties or seventies.
That was controlled by maybe three networks. And the other thing I do is I take walks. I’m a still a hiker to some degree. You got to keep fresh. My wife and I have done a lot of traveling, whether it’s in Portugal or Asia, we, we’ve spent a lot of our money seeing the rest of the world.
[00:18:49] Louis Goodman: Speaking of money, let’s say you came into several billion dollars, let’s say three or four billion dollars. What, if anything, would you do differently in your life?
[00:18:57] Phil Schnayerson: I’d try and buy x so that the guy who currently owns it I didn’t control that, but I, I can’t even imagine it to be honest. I don’t know what I would do. Actually, when I buy raffle tickets and occasionally I do, of course I say, well, When you buy a raffle ticket, if you win, like there recently, there was one guy in Northern California who won a billion dollars.
I mean, I don’t know what I would do if I had a billion dollars. I think I’d worry, you know, I don’t want anybody to know I have a billion dollars in my house or in my bank. I’d worry for my kids, for my grandkids, I, I don’t, I do not want that notoriety.
[00:19:37] Louis Goodman: Maybe the first thing you should do with your billion is hire a security detail.
[00:19:42] Phil Schnayerson: Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Exactly. I might get a better bike, a newer bike. You know, I have the formula for how many bikes a person’s supposed to have, and it’s N plus 1. And being the current number of bikes that I had.
[00:19:56] Louis Goodman: And so you always need one more.
[00:19:58] Phil Schnayerson: Yeah, exactly.

[00:20:00] Louis Goodman: I’m not sure if a billion dollars would do it for you in that case.
[00:20:04] Phil Schnayerson: It would.
[00:20:05] Louis Goodman: Let’s say you had a magic wand and there was one thing you could change in the legal world or the world in general. What would that be?
[00:20:13] Phil Schnayerson: Well, I think that, uh, I don’t think it’s a bad system. Let me just say that first. And Winston Churchill was once asked about democracy. And he perceived that it was the worst system of governing with the exception of all the others.
And I sort of think of that as the American law system. I, of course, am not particularly enamored of the decisions of the current supreme court and I do think that if I could do anything, it would be to change the result of, uh, citizens united. Cause I think money really is destroying the freedoms we have and that it’s destroying the kind of government we have, and it’s going to destroy the Republic that we have because it’s become a situation where a guy, you know, guys who have billions of dollars can virtually buy elections. And it happened in the 1800s, I’m sure it was there in the 1700s and here it is in the 2100s, but I think that if I could change anything, it would be that one decision.
[00:21:22] Louis Goodman: Let’s say you had a Superbowl ad, someone gave you 60 seconds on the Superbowl, you had a really big audience, what would you like to say to that really big audience?
[00:21:34] Phil Schnayerson: Well, probably that our system of justice and our system of governing is an experiment and it’s extremely fragile and that everything should be done to protect it.
It’s a rarity to have a country that is basically a democracy. And by that, I mean one which really cares about individual freedom that exists for any length of time. And that it’s the dictatorships, the kingdoms, the fiefdoms that ruled history for the longest period. I think that that’s the pioneering individual freedoms that I want to see, you know, and if I had the super bowl minute, I would say value the individual freedoms, value this short period of time when a country like ours can exist because it may not exist always.
And to preserve it is important.
[00:22:27] Louis Goodman: Phil, I’m going to come back and have a couple other questions for you. But for right now, I’d like to bring in Lisa Simmons to ask you a question or make a comment. Lisa, can you unmute and join us?
[00:22:40] Lisa Simmons: Absolutely. Thanks, Louis. Hey, Phil.
[00:22:44] Phil Schnayerson: Hi, Lisa.
[00:22:45] Lisa Simmons: I’ve known Phil for decades now. I’ve had the pleasure and the honor of knowing him both as a friend and, and also as a lawyer. And I can’t say enough great things that I’ve witnessed over the years, but Louis, you’ve asked a lot of the questions I had for Phil, but one of them I have that I’ve noticed over the years is that, as successful and as attractive as billed services are and I know he’s getting calls all the time, he always maintains a state of grace and class throughout it all. And you’ll see lots of attorneys get roughed up and they get excited and they, you know, they start to lose control sometimes and, you know, they just don’t have the same kind of even keel that this guy Bill seems to have here. And I’ve always wondered, Bill, as a solo practitioner, and as, as needed as your services are and as busy as you are, what is it about your business model or something that you’re doing that your business that helps you sustain that level of grace and class and capability throughout all these years, considering, you know, there’s a health issue, a family emergency, these kinds of things. It seems like you’ve always seemed to keep a real state of grace and class and consistency in your representation of everyone.
And then I’ll have a second question for you.
[00:24:13] Phil Schnayerson: Well, I think one of the things I’ve done is I really do divide what I do during the day in court from what I do in the evenings at home or on the weekends. I think that the perspective over, over the years, you do develop the perspective that you can do just so much and that you don’t want to burn bridges, that you necessarily need to get over the river sometimes. So I occasionally will go to the mat, but it’s rare that I get ugly. Although it’s not unkown, but if, if I understand what the question is, I try to keep focus in my practice on what I’m there to do, which is to help my client. And if by being a jerk in court, I can’t help my client, then I don’t think I want to be a jerk in court and it’s far more advantageous to me to be a decent person in court, because I’m generally that’s sort of where I am. And I see the benefits of doing that. And especially with the prosecutors, I mean, they have a job to do. I know that I’m really trying to push for the least amount of damage to my clients. And often I get there. And I, you don’t get there by calling the other party names or getting ugly.
You do it by trying to figure out something that’s practical and presenting that. I think that’s your question.
[00:25:49] Lisa Simmons: It is. And you do a great job of it, Phil. And I’ve always admired that. We even co counseled on some cases and I think even a federal case back in the day, and I’ve, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing you in action.
My second question is, as you’ve gotten so many years under your belt and you are quite your intellect and you’ve got cool stories, are you ever considering writing a book?
[00:26:13] Phil Schnayerson: Well, people have asked me and I know a lot of lawyers always claim they’re gonna. But I don’t know that the stories are that interesting and maybe if I retired, I know I have a friend who’s sitting down and he’s writing a story about a case that he’s had and I, and Lou had mentioned there’s going to be a play about a trial that I had in Los Angeles when the Dead Kennedys, the punk rock group were prosecuted, but I’m not sure I would ever do it.
Maybe, you know, I guess I don’t have an unlimited amount of time on this earth. So if I do retire and I have to find something to do, I’m not sure it’s going to be sitting down at a desk and starting to write something, but I’ll consider it.
[00:27:02] Lisa Simmons: Well, we’ll look for you on your bike. Thanks a lot, Phil.
[00:27:05] Phil Schnayerson: Okay, Lisa.
[00:27:07] Louis Goodman: Thanks, Lisa.
[00:27:08] Lisa Simmons: You bet, Louis. And thank you again for featuring Phil again.
[00:27:12] Louis Goodman: Phil, Lisa brought up the play that is based on that case that you had with The Dead Kennedys. I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that case.
[00:27:21] Phil Schnayerson: It was so much fun. Here’s what happened. My wife is an artist and filmmaker.
Her name’s Elizabeth Scher. And In the eighties, she shared a studio with a man who did a lot of video and movie editing. He used her as a second camera or a third camera, sometimes they had more people and he was filming punk rock groups that came through Cal, through San Francisco, mostly, but he would go to different shows in different places.
Well, one of the groups was the Dead Kennedys. They had a lead singer named Jello Biafra, who actually ran for mayor of San Francisco. And he, he was, had lyrics that were somewhat shocking. He did things that were sort of off the wall, but very provocative. He was very bright and he still is actually. He’s, he’s still around, and so he had taken an album of his called Frankenchrist and put a poster in it. Now the poster was a reproduction of a painting by a guy named H. R. Giger.
H. R. Giger was the man who designed the sets and the actual character, the alien, in those movies. You know, this kind of combination of machine and drippy looking animal.
And the specific painting that was put in the post, not the poster that was put in, was named Penis Landscape. You needn’t say much more, and it had penises and vaginas and it was, but it was surreal. I mean, you knew it wasn’t real, but still when a 13-year-old girl in Southern California bought it and her mother saw it, she contacted the attorney general and it became a big, a big deal.
And it was at a time in the eighties when, and I think she recently died, Anita Bryant recently died. Anita Bryant and Tipper Gore were on a tear about obscenity in the public. So a search warrant was served. They arrested the person who sang the song, Jella. They arrested the group, the people in the group.
They arrested the people who poured the vinyl to make the record. They arrested everybody they could arrest. Several of them were dismissed, but eventually, and the prosecutor had never lost the case. And he said, this is the case that’s going to make my name. And so he prosecuted Jello. We’ve got help from the ACLU on the paperwork and most of it, we got denied.
So then they said, well, go in, try the case. It’ll probably go to a guilty verdict and then we’ll go have appeals. And then we think we can win the appeals. But I didn’t think we were going to lose the case. And I got a team together of really interesting lawyers and because there were several defendants and we went to trial and it was one of those trials where my opposition, it was luck.
My opposition made certain mistakes that were rookie mistakes. We voir dire the first 12, probably for three or four days and on that jury was a church lady, clearly, but there were three people there who knew the names of several punk rock groups, and I knew that I wanted them on the jury, and so he passed the challenge.
Right out of the box, he, he just passed the challenge. He figured out how to kick the church lady. And I remember turning to my colleagues and I said, we’re going to pass the challenge. I mean, if he gets just a few votes for guilty and we get a majority for not guilty, they’ll never retry this case.
And that’s what we did. And that’s what happened. So, I used the case to educate the jury on what punk rock actually was. Now there were a lot of political movements within the punk rock movement. They were Nazi punks. They were leftist punks. Jello was a leftist. He was a progressive. And his, the lyrics of his songs, which you couldn’t decipher if you were listening to them, but you could see them on the album cover were against racism and sexism and all the things that we liberals, and I’ll just include myself in that, but all those things that I felt I could get behind in terms of policy, he stood for. And so I made a motion to have the album included, the poster included, the record included, the album notes included, claiming they were a performance piece, and it gave me the opportunity to argue the lyrics. Well, I brought in a guy named Dennis Erican, who published a magazine called BAM, Bay Area Music.
I brought in a guy who wrote books and was an observer of punk rock and music in general named Greal Marcus. They testified. I brought in a psychologist who said that basically Jello was sort of prudish and that the poster was a riff on what had been going on in music, on music albums, like the Tanya Tucker had a very suggestive looking photo.
There were a lot of women singers, and then there were guys who were doing provocative things on their album covers. And I, and I basically said, my position was that, yes, it was an ugly image, but this guy was not pandering to children. And trying to sell obscene material, because that was the definition.
Jello was published, was, was, I’m sorry, was Arrested for distribution of harmful matter to minors. And the definition of harmful matter was obscenity. And I said, obviously this is not what he intended. And that if, if, if they looked at the poster, I would agree it was ugly. And I remember saying, I believe I said it.
I remember saying that if ugly were illegal, half of us probably wouldn’t be here. And the jury, I think they went seven to five for acquittal. And the DA or the prosecutor made a motion to retry it and the judge says, no way, this case is dismissed. Interestingly, even the people who voted for guilty wanted a signed photograph from Jello afterwards.
Instead of signing it, what he did was he took about five of the headshots and he bit the edge so that it had a, an impression of his teeth and he gave it out. But it was, it was so much fun because it got a lot of coverage. The downside was it wasn’t serious. Maybe he would have been fined if he had been found guilty.
But the upside was that there were enough, certainly more than a majority of people who understood and had a sense of humor and weren’t offended by what they saw. May, it may not have gone over as well in Nebraska or Oklahoma. But it certainly in Los Angeles, where we had a real broad spectrum of people, we took the first 12 and they did the right thing.
[00:35:01] Louis Goodman: Phil, if someone wants to get in touch with you, someone is interested in having you represent them in a criminal matter or an attorney has a question that they’d like your input, your information about, what’s the best way to get in touch with you? Is there a website that we can go to?
[00:35:20] Phil Schnayerson: The website is my name, Philip Schnayerson, the name is difficult, it’s S C H N A Y E R S O N.
My phone number is still my name, it’s the Toll-free number would be 888 887 PHIL, P H I L, which is actually 7 4 4 5. And some people have never been able, even though they’ve been my client for 20 years, have never been able to figure out what my last name was. But they always knew they could contact me. And, you know, I’m in Hayward here.
Not many lawyers named Schnayerson in Hayward.
[00:35:57] Louis Goodman: So if we Google Phil Schnayerson, Hayward lawyer, we’ll probably come up with you.
[00:36:03] Phil Schnayerson: Yeah.
[00:36:04] Louis Goodman: Phil, is there anything that you want to talk about that we haven’t discussed, anything at all that you wanted to bring up for the podcast?
[00:36:13] Phil Schnayerson: Now, I do want to say, and if you’ll allow me, that I think these podcasts are really wonderful because too frequently we lawyers live in our own boxes and your podcasts have given me an opportunity to listen to who and what, are practicing law near us, and you also included some people who are experts in their field who are not necessarily lawyers. So I do listen to your podcasts and you didn’t pay me for this advertisement, but I want to give it to you anyhow. So that’s it.
[00:36:46] Louis Goodman: Phil Schnayerson, thank you so much for joining us today at the Alameda County Bar Association and the Love Thy Lawyer podcast.
As always, it’s a pleasure to talk to you.
[00:36:56] Phil Schnayerson: Thank you, Louis. See you, Lisa.
[00:36:59] Lisa Simmons: See you around, Phil.
[00:37:00] Louis Goodman: That’s it for today’s edition of Love Thy Lawyer in collaboration with the Alameda County Bar Association. Please visit the lovethylawyer.com website where you can find links to all of our episodes. Also please visit the Alameda County Bar Association website at acbanet.org where you can find more information about our support of the legal profession, promoting excellence in the legal profession and facilitating equal access to justice.

Thanks to Joel Katz for music, Brian Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media, and Tracy Harvey. I’m Louis Goodman.

[00:37:54] Louis Goodman: So, we’re not going to see your picture on the side of a bus?
[00:37:59] Phil Schnayerson: Well, I doubt it very much. I doubt it very much. You will not see me on the side of a bus.