Cochran capitalizing on O.J. trial victory

By Bettijane Levine
Los Angeles Times

Johnnie Cochran Jr. shows off his media room at the Los Angeles office of The Cochran Firm, which has 120 lawyers in eight states. Before the O.J. Simpson trial, Cochran had a single office in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Times

Ridiculous. His life is almost unimaginably different. He has been super-sized. His yearlong exposure on national TV has inflated almost everything about him: his lifestyle, his goals and his opportunities to achieve them.

Before the trial, Cochran had a single Los Angeles office. Today he is the Cochran Firm, with 120 lawyers in eight states — and growing. His web of informal legal alliances extends nationwide, in a structure so complex that even Cochran cannot easily explain it.

Cochran now works on about 50 cases at a time, often in as many different locations. His private jet facilitates such a workload.

Before the trial, he was a well-known figure in certain Southern California legal circles. Now his face and name are known everywhere. He may be the first private citizen to have such a huge worldwide recognition factor. Strangers send champagne to his table, he is whisked to the front of movie lines, he is parodied on TV, referred to in films. In Soweto, South Africa, little children saw him and sang "The Johnnie Cochran Song." At the Louvre in Paris, he was swarmed by well-wishers. On his first New York subway trip, riders greeted him, and one woman asked him to autograph her Bible.

Cochran's attempts to grapple with this new Imax-sized public image — and to reap its beneficial after effects — may ultimately be more interesting to cultural historians than the trial that made him so famous.

Meanwhile, he's written a legal memoir, "A Lawyer's Life" (St. Martin's Press, with David Fisher). It's his second book since the infamous trial and in it, he weaves together his pre- and post-Simpson cases, to show why he should not be defined by that one case.

On a recent day in his glass-walled Los Angeles offices, Cochran emphasized that the Simpson case, although it had the sexy plot points of a box-office blockbuster, was routine for him in a legal sense. Just one more example of an accused man receiving as much justice as he could pay for.

"If Simpson had been poor, he'd be in jail right now, whether he was innocent or guilty," Cochran says. "In this system, you are innocent until proven broke. When you are broke, you are pretty much finished. That's the way it is, not the way it's supposed to be."

He knows many people think he's "some kind of one-shot, flash-in-the-pan lawyer who used legal mumbo-jumbo and got this guy off that they thought was guilty."

But it was neither his bad rhymes nor his passionate prose that won the case, he says. Simpson could afford the best DNA legal experts (Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck) and detectives to find evidence like the Mark Fuhrman tapes.

The case was important to Cochran's career mostly for the wave of opportunities that flowed from it, he says. He was 57 at the time. For 30 years before that, he had been taking on police departments and the municipalities that financed them. He was so successful and proud of his work long before the Simpson trial that he had been considering retirement. He had enough money, he says. He also had two homes in Los Angeles, multiple cars (including a Rolls-Royce) — and the satisfaction that he had found justice for many clients.

Charles Ogletree, professor and associate dean at Harvard Law School, says Cochran may not have been well known before the so-called "trial of the century," but decades before Simpson, he was revered in the black community, an inspiration to aspiring black lawyers.

But for all his successes, Cochran is not without his detractors. He has a palimony case pending against him in state Superior Court by his former companion of 18 years, Patricia Cochran, who is the mother of his adult son. (He has been married to Dale Cochran, with whom he has two daughters, since 1985.)

He was recently accused by Pasadena, Calif., lawyer Joe Hopkins of stealing cases from other lawyers. Cochran says the same claims have been levied at him in New York and Chicago. "It happens everywhere. People say, 'Here he comes, he's going to take the case away.' That's not my goal. These people call me and ask me to represent them. I would never solicit a case. I don't have to."

Hopkins replies that Cochran doesn't play by the usual rules. "He's supposed to say, 'Look, it sounds to me like the lawyer you have is doing a good job. Why not go ahead and stay with him?' He doesn't do that. It sounds like flat-out greed to me."

Cochran doesn't dwell on such claims. He has added huge corporations to his hit list: He has instituted class-action lawsuits alleging racial or gender discrimination in the workplace against Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey, Alcoa in Cleveland, Hershey in Pennsylvania and BellSouth in Atlanta.

He has formed Cochran Florida as a separate entity with lawyers there, "to deal in mass torts nationwide" against drug companies who sell products that are proved to cause severe injury or death.

The mere mention of Cochran's name is now enough to get some opponents to discuss policy reforms and financial settlements in situations where they might otherwise have let the case go to trial.

Cochran now spends most of his time in New York, where he owns homes in Manhattan and Long Island, and where he is active in Harlem civic affairs, and in the Abyssinian church.