Metropolitan News-Enterprise

 

Thursday, August 3, 2006

 

Page 1

 

Superior Court Candidate Changes Ballot Designation

 

By a MetNews Staff Writer

 

Los Angeles Superior Court candidate George C. Montgomery has changed his official designation on the Nov. 7 ballot from “Trial Lawyer/Teacher” to “Criminal Civil Attorney,” the MetNews learned yesterday.

Montgomery faces Deputy District Attorney Hayden Zacky in a runoff for the seat from which Judge Marion Johnson is retiring in October. Tuesday was the deadline for candidates to change ballot designations from those they used in the June primary.

The Elections Code requires that a candidate’s designation be “either the current principal professions, vocations, or occupations of the candidate, or the principal professions, vocations, or occupations of the candidate during the calendar year immediately preceding the filing of nomination documents.”

Montgomery, who has had a solo civil practice since 1994 and practiced with a firms in New York and Los Angeles before that, told the MetNews in an interview earlier this year that his criminal law experience was limited to having tried three cases early in his career before deciding he did not like representing defendants.

In 1967, he co-founded Montgomery, Bottum, Regal & McNally, where he was head litigator and chair of the management committee, trying over 100 cases. When the firm, which had grown to more than 50 lawyers, broke up in 1984, he joined Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, working out of offices in Los Angeles, Texas, and London, where he appeared before the High Court.

He left Gibson Dunn in 1993 for the New York firm of Chadbourne & Parke, commuting weekly between Los Angeles and New York, he explains, while also working an adjunct faculty member at Loyola Law School. He largely left the practice in 1994, doing a limited amount of pro bono work prior to 1999, when he opened an office in Santa Monica.

A message on his telephone answering machine said he has moved the practice to downtown Los Angeles, but he did not return a phone call late yesterday, nor could his campaign consultant, Larry Levine, be reached for comment.

Zacky said would talk to his recently retained consultants, Joe Cerrell and Hal Dash of Cerrell Associates, before deciding whether to bring a legal challenge to Montgomery’s designation.

 

Copyright 2006, Metropolitan News Company