Location: BlogsAppleseed in the NewsNational Appleseed
	1/30/2007
Linda Singer was not looking for a new job, she said. She was not even looking to practice law anymore. She was running a nonprofit group in the District, and for years, she had told the state of New York -- where she had been admitted to the bar -- that she was retired from the law, with no intention of practicing again. January 30, 2007 Washington Post Henri E. Cauvin Linda Singer was not looking for a new job, she said. She was not even looking to practice law anymore. She was running a nonprofit group in the District, and for years, she had told the state of New York -- where she had been admitted to the bar -- that she was retired from the law, with no intention of practicing again. So, Singer said, she was surprised when D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) came calling and offered her the job as attorney general over breakfast at Four Seasons. The 40-year-old Harvard Law School graduate was not a member of the D.C. Bar until this month, despite having lived and worked in Washington for more than a decade. For 13 years, she had led a Washington-based network of nonprofit organizations called Appleseed, which harnesses pro bono work by law firms to study problems in such areas as education, health care and immigration. Singer's work at Appleseed focused on policy -- stimulating ideas, advocating change and raising money. It was very little like the job as the city's top lawyer that she assumed this month. And in law offices around town, that has people wondering whether she is the right fit for her new post, which she holds in an acting capacity as she awaits confirmation by the D.C. Council. She takes charge of a staff of several hundred people with a variety of responsibilities, which include reviewing the city's bond deals on Wall Street, defending municipal agencies in court, prosecuting juvenile offenders, and cracking down on deadbeat parents and usurious lenders. "She's going to be in the middle of lots and lots of cases of every kind, and that's not been her most recent experience," said Walter Smith, who was second-in-command of the old D.C. counsel office in the mid-1990s. Smith can look at Singer's appointment from two perspectives. He is the executive director of the DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, one of Appleseed's affiliates. "It will be new to her," he said of the city job. "But that doesn't mean she won't be equal to it." It was DC Appleseed, under Smith's predecessor, that catalogued the chronic failings of the city's law office -- long known as the office of the corporation counsel and renamed under Robert J. Spagnoletti, whom Singer succeeds. Legal luminaries who have led the office include: John Payton, who came from a partnership at Wilmer Cutler Pickering; John S. Ferren, who stepped down from the D.C. Court of Appeals; and the late Charles F.C. Ruff, a former U.S. attorney who left a partnership at Covington & Burling. Singer said she thinks that she is well-prepared, too: "I think that the skills that the job requires are skills that I have developed through my career." After graduating from law school in 1991, Singer spent two years as a public defender in Manhattan. Then she came to Washington and was the founding director of Appleseed, which grew from a one-person operation with a $70,000 budget into a 17-office, 70-employee national organization with a budget of several million dollars. Singer said she was especially proud of two studies during her time at Appleseed: One examined immigrant remittances and the practices of the money-transfer industry. The other looked into the No Child Left Behind Act and the usefulness of the information available to parents as a result of the education law. She said she had no reason to belong to the bar in New York or Washington because she was not representing clients. "Quite frankly, I was busy. It wasn't that I was looking for things to do. I was working more than full time running a national organization," she said. In choosing an attorney general with so much experience in social and organizational change -- and so little in the office's traditional areas of practice -- Fenty is staking out a robust role for Singer in changing some of the most dysfunctional corners of government. In an interview, Fenty said that he wanted an attorney general without a "traditional government background" and that he had not expected to land someone of Singer's caliber. "I've known Linda for a few years, and she's always struck me as just one of the brightest minds in the city, legal or otherwise," Fenty said. A mother of two, Singer lives in Forest Hills with her husband, Joe Sternlieb, and she came to know Fenty after meeting him at her children's elementary school, she said. She and Sternlieb are friends with City Administrator Dan Tangherlini. Sternlieb is active in local political circles and was on a Fenty transition committee that handled environmental issues. Singer said she did some modest work for Fenty's mayoral campaign, helping set up a lawyers committee that organized a gathering. It turned out to be a fateful effort nonetheless. The event was to be at Covington & Burling, and in helping put it together, Singer met Peter J. Nickles, a partner at the firm and a close friend of the Fenty family's. Nickles is known for his pro bono legal crusade for better conditions at Oak Hill, the District's juvenile detention facility in Maryland, and Fenty chose him to be his counsel and senior adviser. Lawyers who know Nickles say they expect him to have a broader role than his predecessor, Leonard H. Becker, and that the attorney general's office and Singer could end up subordinated to Nickles. "Who's going to be driving the legal ship?" wondered a lawyer who has worked for the District government and knows Nickles. "The axis of power has moved from the AG's office to the mayor's office," said another lawyer, who knows Nickles and Singer and deals frequently with the District government. The lawyers spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the power of the attorney general's office. In an interview, Nickles said he expects to be a "very forceful voice" in some cases, especially in dealing with agencies that have been operating under court supervision. "I'm going to be spending a lot of time on the issues," he said. "I may appear in the court. I may try cases." Singer said she, too, is determined to do more with those troubled agencies. "Turning over the government to monitors, receivers and judges is a very tough answer," she said. "They're hugely expensive, and so money that could be providing services ends up going to paying experts, masters, all of those folks." Jonathan M. Smith, executive director of the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, said that in many states, including Maryland and New York, the attorney general's office has become a potent force and that the same potential exists in the District. "You'll see that there's a lot of proactive litigation that can be brought against bad actors, and I think that's one place where Linda's experience at Appleseed will serve her well," Smith said. "She's thought about how to bring big cases and about big systemic issues." But Smith has watched the office long enough to know that the job is a bear for even the best lawyers. "There's a risk," he said, "that she'll come in with this great vision but that the day-to-day will quickly grind her down and make it impossible for her to execute that vision." One of Singer's predecessors, Payton, said she is smart and energetic enough to handle one of the hardest jobs in D.C. government. "This is going to depend on her leadership," said Payton, who is at Wilmer Cutler's successor, WilmerHale. "And I think she has plenty of leadership abilities."
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