Rule of Law in Cuba and L.A.

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When I was a young reporter, I was assigned to do an article about how convention and meeting planners pick the cities where they hold events. My editor and I went into the story presuming that the selection hinged on some mysterious metric or elaborate payment-and-kickback system that I was determined to uncover.

I interviewed a woman who was recognized in the convention planning field. “Yeah, there is a magic formula,” she revealed. I leaned forward. “We hold events in the cities our customers want to visit the most.”

I was deflated. Besides making for a very short article, her explanation seemed, well, just too simple. But the logic was undeniable and powerful.

That all came back to me last week when our reporter Joel Russell produced the article on page 1 of this issue about how six local chambers of commerce suddenly are planning trips to Cuba this year.

Why? The reason is simple and powerful. As Randy Gordon, chief of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce, said, that’s where his members most want to visit. And since the Obama administration loosened the rules last year and allowed organized American groups to tour Cuba, the rush is on to finally go to a country that has been unvisitable, at least officially, for most of the last 50-plus years.

Of course, we need to stop for a moment and appreciate the irony of business groups traveling to a country where they can do no business. What’s more, as you can read in the article, a trip to Cuba means you must fill your day with touring and cultural exchange kinds of activities – the opposite of most conferences where you have to steal away from the dry business meetings to sneak in some sightseeing.

Now that I think about it, the notion of enforced touring makes a trip to Cuba even more enticing.

Cuba is especially interesting to people of a certain age (such as many chamber members) – those who remember the revolution in 1959 or the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 or just all the confrontational rhetoric from Fidel Castro, who was the Ahmadinejad of his age.

Heck, I’d like to go just to ride in a 1958 Chevy taxicab.

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Los Angeles has long been recognized as a center of law firms. But is that status slipping a bit?

Law firms tend to congregate around corporate headquarters and big banks, but Los Angeles has slowly been bleeding those. We still have the biggest chunk of the entertainment industry, of course, but studios are hiring fewer lawyers these days.

Meanwhile, as pointed out in the article by Howard Fine on page 1of this issue, intellectual property work is consolidating in the Bay Area and, of course, corporate transactional work has long been clustering in New York.

“Los Angeles as a legal market has been deteriorating for several years,” Peter Zeughauser, a Newport Beach legal consultant, was quoted as saying.

The slippage is not at all severe. In fact, the 7,433 local lawyers we counted in the 100 biggest L.A. law firms (The List begins on page 22), is down by only 17 from the year before. On the other hand, this tiny decline comes at the same time legal work generally is increasing.

In short, L.A.’s slip is starting to show.

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].

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