6 From Wyman, Bautzer Join Rival Firm

The Orange County managing partner of a major Los Angeles law firm has defected with five other attorneys to competitor Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue in Irvine.

The mass departure last week drained the Irvine office of Wyman, Bautzer, Kuchel & Silbert of 25% of its attorney staff.

Thomas R. Malcolm--who also serves as finance chairman of the Orange County Republican Party--said in a prepared statement Monday that he left Wyman to join Jones, Day because of the “opportunity to join a larger firm and to continue to engage in a sophisticated, full-service practice for the benefit of clients.”

Malcom, who changed firms last week, was followed to Jones, Day, the nation’s second largest law firm, by five other attorneys from the Irvine office of Wyman, Bautzer.

The old-line entertainment and corporate law firm said the loss of six of its 25 attorneys in Orange County would not affect its business.

Malcolm, one of the county’s leading trial attorneys, defended Assemblyman Curt Pringle of Garden Grove in a lawsuit that accused Pringle of being involved in placing Republican-hired security guards at polls in Latino neighborhoods in an effort to try and intimidate those voters.

The suit was settled last month when insurers for Pringle and the county GOP agreed to pay $400,000 to the plaintiffs--a group of Latino voters.

Malcom also defended Harbor Municipal Court Judge Calvin P. Schmidt before the state judicial commission. Schmidt was one of six judges involved in a state investigation into a sex and influence scandal at the municipal court branch in Newport Beach.

Schmidt was publicly scolded by state judicial authorities but was allowed to remain on the bench.