New York partner Heather McDonald was quoted in a July 1, 2009, Women's Wear Daily article, "Judge Sotomayor's Fashionable Past."
The focus of the article is Sonia Sotomayor, the U.S. Court of Appeals (Second Circuit) judge who has been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama. Early in her legal career, Sotomayor helped lead an aggressive anticounterfeiting effort on behalf of Fendi while a member of the law firm of Pavia & Harcourt. Sotomayor spent eight years in private practice with Pavia & Harcourt, as a civil litigator, with much of her work focused on representing European fashion and luxury brands, according to the article.
McDonald, who worked for another law firm at the time, was referred to by Sotomayor in a speech she gave to the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition in 1997. Said Sotomayor, "I particularly enjoyed the many lovely afternoons in Chinatown spent, wearing a bulletproof vest, with Heather McDonald—the 'Dragon Lady,' as she was affectionately called by the local vendors—seizing counterfeit goods from the nooks and crannies that many of us never imagined existed within the maze of buildings that is Chinatown."
Sotomayor and McDonald were friendly and often worked together with police and Customs authorities on behalf of their respective clients, according to the article. "We spent a lot of time together in the back of police vans with the windows blacked out," said McDonald. "Frankly, it was a little bit like the Wild West in those days. Counterfeiting had just become illegal with the passage of a federal law in 1984 and this was the early days of enforcement. There was the possibility of violence and we had bodyguards that stuck to us like glue. But as in her entire career, Sonia was a worker: she got right into those dirty basement—you can imagine what they looked like—and took inventory of the counterfeit merchandise," said McDonald.
McDonald and Sotomayor also worked together to draft the anticounterfeiting legislation that became part of the New York state penal code. "It was the first law in New York state that made the sale of counterfeit merchandise illegal," said McDonald. "We spent a lot of time working on that together, and we were the principal drafters of the original legislation. We worked with industry lobbyists and lawmakers to make it law," she said.
With Sotomayor's background, McDonald was asked if she thought it could "subtly tinge" Sotomayor's attitude toward intellectual property cases that come before the Supreme Court. McDonald dismissed the notion, saying, "I don't think that would be a fair comment. If you read her decisions, she has shown that she really cares about the specific facts of a particular case and applies the facts at hand."
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