MinnLawyer Blog

With the Coleman-Franken legal tussle having ended abruptly yesterday, it made me realize that this might be the last we see of Marc Elias, who represented Al Franken through most of the post-election controversy and served as Franken’s public mouthpiece as the case wore on.

What a lot of people didn’t realize that, while Coleman was represented by such Minnesota bar stalwarts as Fritz Knaak and Joe Friedberg, Franken was not. The legal back-and-forth between the two candidates had been going on for a little while before I learned that Elias is based in Washington, D.C., not Minnesota. Something about his voice and demeanor led me to presume that he was “one of us.”

Elias will now return to his post as a partner with the D.C. firm of Perkins Coie. But to a lot of people who followed this case closely, he’ll always be an honorary Minnesota lawyer.

(As a postscript, it should be noted that Elias was hardly the only notable attorney who worked on behalf of Franken, perhaps just the most publicly visible. Local attorneys David Lillehaug and Kevin Hamilton did much of the heavy lifting during the election trial this past winter, providing more than a match for Coleman’s team.)