Washington and Lee University School of Law

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Cliff Stricklin '91

Cliff Stricklin '91 worked hundreds of 15- hour days over the 20 months he served on the Justice Department's Enron Task Force. By mid-summer 2006, he was able to pause and catch his breath after helping to win convictions against top Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling.

On January 31, 2006, opening statements from the prosecution and defense launched the much awaited trial of Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, accused of engineering a massive fraud at Enron that led to the energy giant's meltdown in 2001. Four months later, the jury convicted both of multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy. A year earlier, Stricklin led the prosecution of five defendants in the four-month Enron Broadband Services trial.

"The last year and a half has been more professionally challenging to me than any other time in my career," he says. "Anyone who has been in a high-profile jury trial will tell you that it is a battle."

Lay, who had been chairman of Enron, and Skilling, the CEO, spent a reported $70 million on their defense. "At one time, I counted more than 30 attorneys in the courtroom representing the two defendants," Stricklin says. "We couldn't take anything for granted, or do any job halfway. Everything we produced faced an incredible amount of scrutiny."

Although no cameras were allowed in the courtroom, shielding U.S. District Judge Simeon T. Lake III, the lawyers and witnesses from the trivial gaze of entertainment television, the trial generated hundreds of pages of blog traffic every day on the Internet—mostly by observers with legal backgrounds. Despite the unpopularity of the Enron executives, a small but prolific band of Internet commentators took regular potshots at the prosecution, some of it reflecting Lay's contention in a speech just prior to trial that he was a victim of "a wave of terror by the Enron Task Force."

Still, post-trial evaluations generally praised the tactics and the performance of the prosecutors. Stricklin had the leading role in jury selection, and the jurors showed themselves in post-trial interviews to be a cohesive panel, both level-headed and eloquent. As one pundit wrote, the jurors "voiced confidence that they had made the best decision possible after the biggest collective challenge of their lives."

Four of the nine prosecutors on the Enron Task Force worked the Lay/Skilling trial. "As we prepared for trial, we worked 15-hour days, seven days a week," Stricklin says. "Once trial began, our first half of the day was spent in court until about 4:45 p.m. Then we'd go upstairs to our offices to begin preparing for the next day's witnesses. It wasn't uncommon to work on four hours of sleep. Those kind of hours and that kind of scrutiny take a toll on you."

Kathryn Ruemmler, the deputy director of the Enron Task Force and a Lay/Skilling prosecutor, says Stricklin was an "absolutely invaluable" member of the trial team. "Cliff cross-examined some of the most delicate defense witnesses and either quickly neutralized them or, in some cases, turned them into government witnesses. Outside the courtroom, Cliff always had constructive insights to offer to his trial partners about how certain witnesses, lines of testimony or arguments were coming across to the jury. His easy, unassuming style earned him the respect of everyone in the courtroom."

The two other members of the prosecution team were Sean Berkowitz, task force director, and John Hueston.

For Stricklin, the trial of the two top executives was an especially tough test because he was physically and mentally exhausted before he even joined the prosecution team. In the fall of 2004, he had been a state district court judge in Dallas, finishing up his first four-year term in the elected position. But despite an endorsement by The Dallas Morning News, he lost his bid for re-election.

Destiny cleared the way for him to join the Enron Task Force, but it also gave him a tiger by the tail. As co-lead prosecutor of the Broadband Services Internet fraud trial, he jumped straightaway into marathon days that lasted until the trial ended with a hung jury in July 2005.

"I am an avid runner, but for four months during the Broadband trial I did almost nothing to stay in shape," Stricklin says. He was also living in an apartment in Houston, and could see his wife, Robin, and their two sons only a day or two each month.

The disappointing result of a deadlocked jury added to his frustrations. He still believes that U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore should have forced the Broadband jury to deliberate longer. Jurors had deliberated for only three days after a four-month trial when the judge declared the mistrial. (The Lay/Skilling jury deliberated for six days.) "Given time, jurors usually come up with the right result," he says. "After so much money and time, none of us had any answers."

But he was not down for long. Valuable lessons were to be gleaned from the Broadband prosecution. "Although the two cases were, for the most part, different, the Lay/Skilling prosecution took some lessons on simplification from Broadband," he explains. And he learned a lot about digesting complex terminology such as "monetizations and joint ventures" or "pinging, routers and network control software" for jurors. In the end, the former chief financial officer of Enron Broadband Services, Kevin Howard, was re-indicted and convicted in July 2006 of conspiracy and fraud.

Stricklin believes that the prosecutors' "success in simplifying the complexities of what happened inside Enron was our greatest accomplishment and led directly to the conviction of both Skilling and Lay."

Stricklin with Sean Bekowitz outside the Federal Court House in Houston during the trial.

By some post-trial accounts, Lay and Skilling were their own worst enemies on the witness stand. Stricklin gives the defense team credit fordoing "a remarkable job of presenting a common defense." He adds, "The defendants were so different both in management style and in the public image they cultivated, I expected to see more of a divide at trial."

And how did he react when he heard of Lay's death from a heart attack? "Like most everyone else, I was surprised. He had engendered great loyalty from many people by acts of kindness and charity. But, as we learned during the investigation and during the testimony in court, there was another side to Lay that was not quite as polished. When he took the stand, he appeared strident and bellicose. It was clear that he was a man unused and unwilling to be questioned about his actions. Some of those actions helped bring down the company he built and, in the process, ruined many, many lives.

"My years on the bench and in law enforcement have taught me that most people, under the right circumstances, are capable of committing crimes. I was cross-examining one of Lay's character witnesses, a pastor and leader in the African-American community in Houston, when I asked him if he thought good people can do bad things. His answer was, 'That's true for every one of us in this courtroom.'

"There may be some who feel further victimized by Lay not having to go to prison. However, I feel that it was tremendously important for the public to have witnessed a thorough and fair trial where everyone had his or her say, including Lay, and the facts about what happened at Enron were finally revealed. The jury's guilty verdicts were the last steps in a healing process for many of the Enron victims."

Enron prosecutions "have caused CEOs and board members throughout the country to re-examine how they do business," Stricklin says. "What has become clear in the last three or four years is that when an executive loses sight of what his or her responsibilities are and puts his or her own interests ahead of the shareholders, there is a price to pay."

Stricklin says he is pleased and proud to have joined the Enron Task Force, but that the two best decisions he ever made were to marry his wife, Robin, and to attend law school at Washington and Lee.

The support of his wife, whom he married while a law student, has been "phenomenal" during his service as an Enron prosecutor, he says. "Though now, I've got a lot of making up to do."

After earning his B.A. in history and political science at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, Stricklin took a job with the Drug Enforcement Agency, intending to apply to law school later on. He was on his way north to begin work in Washington when he pulled off Interstate 81 to check out W&L. "When I set foot on the campus, I knew that this is where I wanted to go to law school," he says.

After two years with the DEA, he applied to the Law School and drove down from Washington to try to improve his chances by talking with the director of admissions, Susan Palmer. "I promised to take only 10 minutes, but our conversation progressed to broad ideas of justice and how I planned to use law school to become an effective trial advocate. After close to an hour, as I was standing to leave, Ms. Palmer said, 'Well, you just won your first case. I'm going to offer you admission to this fall's class.'"

W&L was the ideal place for him to study law. "There was a true comradeship among the students and faculty. Professors such as Uncas McThenia '58A, '63, Joan Shaughnessy and Sam Calhoun not only helped me to think like a lawyer, but also challenged me socially and spiritually. I really grew there as a person—more than at any other time in my life. Our oldest son, Cal, is named after Professor Calhoun and, really, his entire family. We count them as dear friends to this day."

Stricklin's name in an e-mail subject line brought a prompt response from Calhoun. "I treasure his friendship," he wrote. "While he has accomplished a great deal in his legal career, I'd like to emphasize a characteristic that plays a big part in my memories of him as a law student—his sense of humor. Several times Cliff came to our house with other students, and he routinely entertained us all for extended periods with stories from his past. People literally laughed until it hurt."

During law school, Stricklin clerked for Rudolph Giuliani's Securities Fraud Unit in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. After graduation, he became an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas. A short stint as a litigator for the Dallas firm of Andrews & Kurth preceded his election to the Criminal District Court judgeship in Dallas.

A son of a Baptist minister, Stricklin says he has a lawyer friend who insists that Baptists make the best prosecutors because they believe in right and wrong and are not shy about sharing their beliefs with others. "I don't know about all of that, but I will say that I was raised in a home where there were very clear boundaries as to what was acceptable and what was not."

Nevertheless, he adds, "There was never a time when I was taught about justice and sin when I wasn't also taught about grace, mercy and forgiveness."

Although Stricklin has wrapped up his work with the Enron Task Force, he plans to remain a government prosecutor. This fall he and his family will move to Denver, where he will take a job as first assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Colorado. His first big assignment: lead prosecutor in the insider trading case against former Qwest Communications CEO Joe Nacchio.

But first, he'll travel to Malawi, to speak about the Enron prosecution at the invitation of Peter Strasser '79, the U.S. justice department's resident legal advisor to that African country. It will probably be the first of many such invitations. After all, while the case has been won, the analysis of its impact has just begun.

-- by Jim Raper