There is a Byzantine dance that goes on in this town," says Washington superlawyer Robert Bennett, "where the press is quick to crown you, and then they set about to tarnish the crown."

Bob Bennett-the chunky, scrappy, savvy, media-wise, onetime boys’ boxing champ; the tenacious trial lawyer with street-fighting instincts, and a lust for the limelight; the man who has honed his press-spinning talents while stalking the Keating Five on national television in 1990 and 1991, while massaging (and, some say, subtly threatening) the Bush White House to get former Defense secretary Caspar Weinberger a Christmas Eve pardon in 1992, while helping Clark Clifford and his protege Robert Altman beat state and federal prosecutions in 1993-has discovered the fickleness of the press.

Not to mention the hazards of falling out with a high-profile client-especially when the client is Congressman Dan Rostenkowski, who clearly has legitimate grievances.

This article will show that-at a minimum-Bennett inexcusably failed to consult adequately with the then chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee before taking on the representation of President Clinton in f the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. It also tells how Bennett’s representation of Clinton provoked tensions in the Rostenkowski camp, and raised concerns in the mind of the chief prosecutor. Bennett went on television to defend his new client, the president, at the most delicate stage in the Clinton Justice Department’s deliberations over whether to indict Rostenkowski. To outsiders, it looked like the president’s lawyer would now be lobbying the Justice Department on behalf of the congressman- who just happened to be a key ally in the administration’s push for comprehensive health insurance.

Editor’s Note: The people and events referred to in this story are fictitious. It was written in 1984 as part of a special issue imagining what the legal world might look like in 2009.

Tilton Coleman looked drained as he took his seat after an eloquent 90-minute closing. He had projected his usual cool confidence to the jury, in U.S. district court in Los Angeles. But his clients and partners, watching from Boston, San Francisco, Warsaw, Beijing, and Tokyo, could see what the jury could not. On the eight-foot screens in their conference rooms, Coleman’s youthful 42-year-old visage was etched with worry as he walked back to the counsel table.

It was not the first time he had stood up in court with the fate of Sanus Inc. hanging in the balance. But January 14, 2009, was the first time he had sat down thinking he was going to lose. As if to confirm his pessimism, the feedback window in the monitor on his table showed the plaintiffs heavily favored by the on-line focus group of interactive TV viewers who had watched the whole trial.

If the jury and the appellate courts saw it the same way, Coleman knew, it could deal a devastating blow to the $200-million-a-year embryo screening company: More than 300 children and their families already had claimed that the children’s mental and emotional problems had been "caused" by San us.

Most of the children suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), depression, or schizophrenia. Their lawyers blame these ills on the Sanus embryo screening process, under which couples use (mostly) their own sperm and eggs to create numerous pre-embryos in vitro, then choose which ones to implant in the woman’s uterus on the basis of tests identifying which embryos have detectable defect and disease genes, and which gave genes associated with purportedly positive traits – height, for example.

Editor’s Note: The people and events referred to in this story are fictitious. It was written in 1984 as part of a special issue imagining what the legal world might look like in 2009.

Lawrence Robbins had to stretch to find support in Supreme Court precedent., but he made the most of the facts in the Court’s second active-euthanasia case involving Alzheimer’s disease. The lawyer put the monkey on the justices’ backs at the February 4 argument in Madison v. California by implicitly floating this question:

What would you have done differently if you had found yourself in my client’s position?

Robbins seemed 10 have at least four votes leaning his way throughout – Chief Justice Kathleen Sullivan and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jose Cabranes, and Webster Hubbell. California attorney general Jim Sutton and amicus Richard Taranto, representing the National Association of Attorneys General, got a friendly reception from Justice Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Frank Easterbrook, and J. Harvie Wilkinson III. That left Justice Sandra Day O’Connor once again seeming 10 relish her role as noncommittal swing Vote.

Robbins pitched his argument to O’Connor from the opening sentence: "Only this Court now stands between m;, 68-year-old client. Florence Madison, and 20 years in prison for committing Iwo deeply moral acts of love – acts very much like those hypothesized by the concurrence [of O’Connor, in 2006] in Jackson v. New York.

"Eight years ago, in 2001, my client did what she had to do to prevent her husband from blowing out his brains with a shotgun: She promised to spare him the kind of wretched, lingering death that he had watched his mother endure. In exchange for his agreement to forgo suicide, she promised to help him die with dignity if and when he had declined into such a state of living death that – by his own reckoning – he would have nothing left to live for.

Bill Gates, the second-richest man in America, was working through his second round of visits this past summer at the Federal Trade Commission, a place as creaky and antiquated as Gates’s Microsoft Corporation is sleek and dynamic.

Gates had a potent lobbying team along: Microsoft’s chief in-house counsel, William Neukom; former FTC commissioner Patricia Bailey; and partners from New York’s Sullivan & Cromwell and from Preston Thor-grimson Shidler Gates & Ellis, the big Seattle-based firm where Gates’s father is a senior partner.

But in his visits to each of the four participating com¨missioners on two clammy July days, the 38- (then 37-) year-old Microsoft chairman did much of the talking himself. And at times he got a bit carried away-just as his company sometimes does in the heat of battle against competitors. Like when he barked, "You don’t know what you’re talking about," at an FTC official in a meet¨ing in the chairman’s office.

Or when Commissioner Dennis Yao, a soft-spoken former Wharton business school professor, floated a line of hypothetical questions suggesting possible curbs on Microsoft’s growing monopoly power, including disclo¨sure to competitors and the public of technical data about its dominant personal computer (PC) operating systems, MS-DOS and Windows.

Gates was vexed. "He started by calling Yao’s ideas socialistic," recalls a source familiar with the July 15 meeting, "and as he got angrier and angrier and louder and louder, he got into calling them Communistic."