One mid-February morning, some employees at the Cochran Firm arrived to find the locks changed at their office instead of Valentine’s Day greetings. Barred from entering, said one partner, was his support staff.

The move was dramatic but not entirely surprising: It stemmed from an ugly power struggle between partners at the firm founded by the late Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., famed for his civil rights work and successful defense of O.J. Simpson against murder charges in 1995.

The two feuding attorneys, Randy H. McMurray and Brian T. Dunn, worked with Cochran for years and took the reins of the L.A. office on Wilshire Boulevard after his death in 2005. Now, each man claims he is the office’s managing partner and has removed the other from the partnership.

“The partnership that was between myself and Mr. McMurray is being dissolved. The Cochran Firm is going to continue to go on in Los Angeles and we are going to continue to carry on the name,” asserted Dunn.

The fight has escalated into almost a personal dispute, with lawsuits and allegations of sexual improprieties, personal use of firm money and other misconduct – all of which has divided the office of 10 attorneys.

At stake is control over the office that Cochran started in 1981. McMurray, who became managing partner after Cochran’s death, tried to expel Dunn in August, accusing him of plotting to take over the firm. Dunn, who joined the firm nearly 20 years ago, moved to replace McMurray as managing partner about the time of the February lockout, which he accused McMurray of instigating. McMurray declined to comment for this article.

It’s not the first controversy over the firm’s leadership in the absence of Cochran, who built a network of offices all over the country. In the year after his death, several high-profile departures from the L.A. office followed disagreements among partners.

Still, the new dispute has raised questions about the direction of what many considered the leading black law firm in Los Angeles, dismaying those familiar with its history.

“When I see the things going on now I am mortified,” said Eric Ferrer, an attorney who spent 20 years at the firm before leaving in 2005. “Johnnie must be turning in his grave. It has nothing to do with his legacy, it has nothing to do with his vision, it has nothing to do with the kind of cases he championed. It’s just offensive.”

Building brand

There’s a reason the Cochran brand continues to be fought over. His reputation extended beyond the O.J. Simpson trial into success as a plaintiff’s attorney, especially with civil rights cases against law enforcement.

After a three-year stint as the first black assistant district attorney in Los Angeles County, Cochran returned to private practice in 1981, opening the Law Offices of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. on Wilshire at Highland Avenue near the Miracle Mile, where the office remains today. He became known for representing minority victims of police misconduct, including winning a $760,000 settlement for a college football player shot dead by police and a then-record $9.2 million judgment for Patty Diaz, a teenager sexually assaulted by a Los Angeles Police Department officer.

And after rocketing to fame with the Simpson case in 1995, Cochran struck a deal in the late 1990s with a group of attorneys in Dothan, Ala., to start a national office. It was spurred by his friendship with one of the lawyers, Jock M. Smith, a well-known trial lawyer equally regarded for his enormous sports memorabilia collection. Smith became the national office’s president until his death in January.

“Johnnie was very taken not only with Jock and his personality, but also with the fact that a black man would have a collection like that,” said Samuel A. Cherry Jr., a national partner at the Cochran Firm. “Jock set up a meeting in New Orleans in 1998 at the jazz festival and we really hit it off.”

The Alabama group set up national offices around the country that pay fees for administration. The offices receive benefits such as the use of the Cochran name, as well as business originating from calls to the firm’s national 1-800 number. Office heads meet twice a year, usually in Las Vegas. By the time of Cochran’s death from an inoperable brain tumor in 2005, the firm had 100-plus attorneys in more than a dozen offices.

But Cochran’s death also led to internal friction at the original L.A. office. The surviving attorneys, now without some of the big cases Cochran brought in, disagreed on what kind to take on next. Ferrer said the office began moving away from emphasizing civil rights cases.

“It just seemed to me that the focus was not on the work but was on the financial situation and who was going to get what,” said Ferrer, who joined the firm in 1984 and served as co-managing partner with Cochran for a time.

Departures of attorneys Ferrer and Shawn Holley, a well-regarded partner known today for her representation of actress Lindsay Lohan, soon followed.

Some of the tensions were also due to changes put in place by the national office in Alabama. It set up a criminal defense office in Santa Monica a year after Cochran’s death, staffing it with attorneys who took on rape and sexual molestation defense cases – something Cochran had generally avoided.

Most controversial were the allegations that the firm was becoming an unfriendly environment for black attorneys, given the perceived influence of the national office, where two of three surviving co-founders were white. National partner Cherry disputed that notion, pointing out most of the attorneys in the L.A. office have been black.

“The numbers didn’t lie on that,” he said. “The conflict was more along the lines of two or three lawyers who had been there for a long time and then a group that hadn’t been there for maybe seven or eight years.”

But after some time, the firm settled down. The criminal defense office in Santa Monica split off, and Dunn said that he and other attorneys continued to handle civil rights cases. He cited the settlement of a case on behalf of the family of Darrick Collins, an unarmed man shot to death by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies in 2009. And even more recently, the firm is representing the family of Manuel Loggins, a 31-year-old Marine sergeant whose death at the hands of Orange County sheriff’s deputies near Camp Pendleton has become highly publicized.

The spoils

Now, after surviving the initial upheaval in the wake of Cochran’s death, Dunn and McMurray are at each other’s throats.

The two formed a partnership in 2007 in which Managing Partner McMurray had a 67 percent stake and Dunn 33 percent, according to court documents.

McMurray then recruited trial lawyer Joseph M. Barrett to the firm. Then in 2010, the three men worked out a new partnership in which McMurray retained a 41 percent stake, Dunn took 39 percent and Barrett had 20 percent.

But tensions between McMurray and Dunn blew up in August. McMurray became suspicious that Dunn was planning to take over the office and bring in another outside partner. He claims in a lawsuit filed last month in Los Angeles Superior Court that Dunn called the firm’s clients and told them to communicate only with Dunn. In response, McMurray claims to have expelled Dunn from the partnership in August.

Cherry characterized the dispute as a clash of strong wills and personality types.

“They have some continuing issues,” he said. “I came out there in August and spent three days with them. I thought we had all smoked the peace pipe and they were going to be fine and then it exploded again.”

Ferrer, the former partner, said the two have slightly different approaches: Dunn, who has been at the firm longer, continues to take many civil rights cases, while McMurray is a little more open to taking on other kinds of cases.

In January, things heated up again, according to legal documents later filed by both sides. Dunn questioned McMurray’s use of nearly $400,000 of the firm’s money, claiming it appeared to be wedding expenses. And McMurray claimed Dunn made unauthorized use of the company credit card that month for personal travel.

On Feb. 13, Dunn and Barrett removed McMurray as managing partner, and that night, McMurray changed out the locks, according to Dunn’s filing. When employees arrived the next morning, not all of them were allowed in. They included members of Dunn’s support staff, according to his filing. Barrett, who was allowed in, told the Business Journal that he unlocked the door so that others could enter.

But McMurray claimed in another filing that he had been cut off from accessing the firm’s e-mail and computer systems, and that his order to change the locks stemmed from an investigation into that. He further alleged that Dunn had harassed an employee and McMurray’s wife, an attorney brought in as co-counsel on one of the firm’s cases, in a parking lot after Dunn spotted the two women investigating the server room. McMurray stated in the filing that he changed the locks to “prevent further disruption.”

Dunn and Barrett then moved to remove McMurray from the partnership altogether, sending him a notice of expulsion in late February, according to Dunn’s filing. The partners also began disputing payouts for cases won by the firm, and the conflict entered salacious territory.

In his March lawsuit, McMurray alleged that Dunn had provided free salary and overtime pay for an employee in exchange for sexual services. He also said Dunn had sex with a private investigator who billed the firm for her time.

Dunn denied McMurray’s charges to the Business Journal.

“We categorically deny all of those allegations and we think they’re in poor taste,” he said.

Partners for now

The discord has been disheartening for those who worked with and knew the firm when Cochran was alive. While it has been extreme, the clash illustrates some of the challenges for personality-driven firms when they’re handed off to the next generation, said Sandy Lechtick, president of Woodland Hills legal search firm Esquire Inc.

“What happens to a lot of these small firms when they’re a cult of personality or where there’s one person that’s been really the go-to guy, as Mr. Cochran was, is that when he’s out of the picture things seem to go south,” he said. “There are often leadership transition issues to fill the hole.”

Although uncomfortable, Dunn and McMurray continue to work out of the same office, waiting for the outcome of the legal case between them. It’s possible that one will not continue as a partner or stay on at all, leaving only one partner in the office who was there during Cochran’s reign.

In the meantime, the national office recognizes Dunn as the office’s managing partner. The three partners are taking a minimum share of profits, according to court documents filed by Dunn, with the understanding the rest will be divided later.

Barrett expressed confidence that the dispute would be resolved in short order.

“If there are some squabbles with the partners, I see it as more background noise to the larger day-to-day business,” he said.

As for the Cochran family, Cochran’s widow, Dale Mason Cochran, declined to comment. But the family is kept in the loop in monthly calls with the national office, and the firm has an agreement with Cochran’s estate to pay out regular compensation to his family, Cherry said.

“We try to make certain that Johnnie’s legacy is lived out and part of the agreement with the estate is that they would stay involved,” he said. “I can assure you the first question at the next meeting is, ‘How are things going in Los Angeles?’”