Blue-chip firm Skadden Arps is throwing its considerable resources behind the sort of case that we have to imagine is pretty rare in the halls of the AmLaw 200.
It involves a missing 8-year-old boy who vanished from a New York City foster home in early 2010.
Skadden was appointed to represent the boy’s interests after his birth mother sued the city’s Administration for Children’s Services and the boy’s foster parent for allegedly failing to protect the boy, according to this New York Daily News account.
An interesting twist in the case is that Skadden is being accused by the New York Police Department of being overly meddlesome in its efforts to find its client, the Daily News reports.
Skadden wants the firm’s private investigator to be able to look at the police file for clues about the boy’s whereabouts, but the NYPD has resisted, contending that a peek at the file could compromise the identity of informants and witnesses, according to the Daily News.
Brooklyn federal magistrate Steven Gold this week sided with police, ruling that he could not order the NYPD to open the missing-person file.
Skadden, which is handling the case on a pro bono basis, has not returned a Law Blog request for comment.
In this letter sent to Gold earlier this week, Skadden attorney Jonathan Lerner wrote that it is “extremely disappointing, to say the least, that the NYPD is unwilling to allow us access to the investigative file for the specific purpose of bringing in additional professional resources to attempt to locate our client, who the NYPD has failed to find in the more than 18 months it has been investigating his disappearance.”
Lerner added in the letter that he doubted the city would deny Skadden’s request if the missing child “were from a more privileged and influential background.”
“We believed the court reached the correct decision,” Janice Silverberg, a New York City lawyer representing the police department, said in a statement to the Law Blog.
