About Erik Lundegaard
Erik Lundegaard has been a senior editor at Super Lawyers since 2005 and its editor in chief since 2013—during which time the magazine has won close to 100 journalism awards around the country. His freelance writing has been published by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Salon, MSNBC.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Seattle Times and The Believer, among others. He has a B.A. in English from the University of Minnesota, studied Mandarin Chinese in Taipei, Taiwan, and lives in Seattle, Washington, where he is a long-suffering Seattle Mariners fan. In his spare time, he is working on a book about the movies of James Cagney.
Articles written by Erik Lundegaard
Tobacco Road
Dustin Whittenburg is collecting some of the most prized baseball cards in the worldBeware of what you don’t let your kids do. Dustin Whittenburg grew up in the 1980s in the Texas Panhandle, just outside of Amarillo, playing football. “That’s in the heart of Friday Night Lights country,” he says with a verbal shrug. “Everybody plays football.” He also collected cards, but leaned toward baseball more than football. “I always liked the history of baseball,” he explains. “And back then they would have card shows. eBay didn’t exist. Online auctions didn’t …
Notes from the Panda-Emic
Proud Usahacharoenporn dealt with isolation through artHow much of a time warp did the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic put us through—when every day in March 2020 seemed like a week? Proud Usahacharoenporn is trying to recall when she wrote her book, Panda-Emic!, and thinks it was right in the middle of the 2020 lockdown. “Probably in summer—around June,” she says. Then she searches for the answer. “Oh, looks like April, actually.” A business litigator at Rutan & Tucker in Irvine, Usahacharoenporn is a social person who’s …
Brave New World
Streaming has replaced theatrical but what will replace streaming? Schuyler Moore on the state of film financingLast September we caught up with entertainment lawyer Schuyler Moore, the subject of the 2010 feature “A Bit of a Rebel with a Bit of a Cause,” to talk over the last two decades of the industry. How has entertainment law changed in the last 20 years? It’s completely moved from a theatrical model to a streaming model. And that has completely changed film financing. In what way? We used to do pre-sales and go to all the film markets—Cannes, Toronto, Venice, etc.—and you’d sell …
Wasser Redux
Laura Wasser on the last 20 years of family law and what might happen if Obergefell is overturnedBack in 2004, Laura Wasser graced the cover of the first Southern California Rising Stars magazine, where she talked about repping all five members of the band Korn, traded jokes with her father, and told of the Seussian origins of the star tattoo above her right ankle. She’s now a regular on the Top 100 Super Lawyers list and the go-to attorney for celebrity divorces, having repped Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie and Kim Kardashian, among others. We caught up with her in September. Welcome …
Being Atticus
What’s it like to be named for the most beloved lawyer in American literature?Atticus Wegman has heard it so often he simply calls it “the question.” It’s been asked by professors at law school, judges in court, fellow attorneys, prospective clients, and now by Super Lawyers: Were you named for Atticus Finch? “My mother loved To Kill a Mockingbird and talked to my grandfather about the name,” says Wegman, a plaintiff’s personal injury attorney at Aitken • Aitken • Cohn in Santa Ana. “It stuck.” If it comes up in court, Wegman says, “I’ll put out a …
Overturning Quill
Tax attorney Richard Litwin already had a busy practice; then the U.S. Supreme Court changed the way remote businesses workedHe didn’t think they’d do it. Richard Litwin had been watching the tax issue make its way through the courts since Justice Kennedy offered his concurring opinion in DMA v. Brohl in 2015. There, Kennedy encouraged states to consider laws requiring remote sellers—those who had no physical presence in the state but sold to residents there—to collect the state’s sales and use tax. Consider it a digital-age corrective to benefit brick-and-mortar businesses—not to mention state …
Speed, Unprecedented Speed
Why Ali Awad says social media is the future of the legal businessAsk Ali Awad why he chose “CEO Lawyer” as his social media handle and he’ll talk for 10 minutes—a nonstop, driven 10 minutes—namechecking Dr. Phil and Kid Rock, and delving into his past without delving too deeply into his past. That part comes later in the conversation. Initially he simply mentions growing up working with his hands in machine shops and stereo shops—so he appreciates the value of manual labor and he knows about workplace injuries. He talks about starting a business …
What Does It Mean to Have a Public Defender on the U.S. Supreme Court?
Four former PDs on the importance of Ketanji Brown Jackson“It’s high time, frankly.” Reuben Cahn, a general litigator at Keller/Anderle in Irvine, California, is talking about the prospect of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson becoming not only the first Black woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court but its first former public defender as well. “Right now, there are four former prosecutors on the court, and there is not a single former criminal defense lawyer—let alone a former public defender,” says Barry Berke, who spent four years as a federal …
The Bridge to Armenia
Mhare Mouradian gives back to the country he never knewMhare Mouradian had an itinerant childhood—born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area—but he didn’t get the chance to visit the land of his Armenian ancestors until 2015, when he was 40. He was amazed to see the history he’d only read about, and describes visiting Geghard, a church carved into the side of a mountain, as “a holy experience.” He got to see some family history, too. After the Armenian genocide of 1915-1917, his mother’s side of the family …
Five Months in Jerusalem
Eliza Ghanooni recounts clerking for Israel’s Supreme CourtEliza Ghanooni frequently worked out in the summer of 2006—and not just at any gym. It was the world-famous Jerusalem International YMCA in Israel, designed in the 1920s by Arthur Loomis Harmon, the American architect who designed the Empire State Building, and featuring neo-Byzantine architecture, a 152-foot observation tower, three chapels, and an auditorium. One day, out front, Ghanooni was glancing down at the cobblestones. “I just remember thinking about being there, being in …
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