Legal News

Looking for Used Chairs and Cheap Microwaves? Dreier LLP?s Got Em!

By Ashby Jones

Anyone who happened to be in New York yesterday and was looking to round out his or her offices with some well-appointed furniture on the cheap, Dreier LLP’s former digs were the place to be. That’s where auctioneer Barton Hyde sold off everything a bunch of the firm’s possessions — as the New York Law Journal put it, “everything from mugs and pens with the firm’s logo to a Herman Miller Eames chair.” Click here for the NYLJ story; here, here and here for recent LB coverage on the Dreier situation.

Thursday’s sale came less than four months after the firm’s founder and sole equity partner, Marc Dreier, was arrested at LaGuardia Airport after being charged in Toronto with impersonating an employee of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. According to the latest indictment, the attorney stands accused of peddling almost $700 million in notes to 13 different hedge funds and three individuals.

According to the NYLJ story, about 70 bidders attended the auction, some of whom knew little about the Dreier backstory.

Some items up for grabs reportedly sold at bargain-basement prices, including a walnut bookcase for $50, a tan ultra-suede sofa for $275, 13 knoll task chairs at $225 a piece, and a white microwave oven for $25. Even the Eames chair sold at the relatively cheap price of $1,250.

“I feel like I’ve been shot by a bullet,” Hyte joked as he sold a five-drawer lateral file for $100.

At one point, an ex-Dreier employee who did not want to give his name shouted, “They just sold my office for a hundred bucks.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 27, 2009 (boomark / email).