Column One

A LAW UNTO HERSELF

The Criminal Defense Attorney Is Star-Struck, Young and Unorthodox.
but Don't Be Fooled. She's Also Ivy League, Savvy and Successful.

Matt Farrell, a video producer, needed an attorney after he had been
charged with growing marijuana. He hired Allison Margolin, "L.A.'s
dopest attorney," on a friend's recommendation.

Farrell's first impression was "she was hot." His second was doubt.
She looked too young to be a lawyer.

Then he saw the Ivy League degrees on her wall.

Like actress Reese Witherspoon's character in the movie "Legally
Blonde" - a rich, ditsy Beverly Hills blond who goes to Harvard Law
School - Margolin, 28, is the kind of lawyer who might be easy to
dismiss. The graduate of Beverly Hills High talks like a Valley girl,
preceding adjectives with "like" and using "whatever" as a period.

Her years at Columbia University and Harvard Law School failed to dim
her fascination with movie stars. She is devoted to the tabloids and
knows intimate details about the rich and famous.

Her husband said she used to believe whatever her clients told her,
accepting preposterous explanations for crimes. There was the woman
who didn't mean to stab her boyfriend. She just threw a basket that
happened to contain a knife.

And there was the time Margolin burst into tears after a prosecutor
told her she had only minutes to decide whether to take a deal that
would put a client in prison for 17 years. The prosecutor relented
and extended the deadline.

A lawyer for 3 1/2 years, Margolin has gained notoriety for
unorthodox ads that proclaim her "L.A.'s dopest attorney." She even
has a video publicizing her practice on the Internet site
http://www.youtube.com

Her self-promotions have raised eyebrows in a profession in which
many lawyers still frown upon advertising as ambulance chasing. Until
not quite 30 years ago, lawyer advertising was banned altogether.

"Need warrant recalled?" her radio, movie and newspaper ads ask.
"Want to smoke pot on probation? All criminal defense, from drugs to
murder. Harvard Law, affordable."

She is the daughter of Bruce Margolin, the widely known defense
lawyer who has championed efforts to decriminalize marijuana and once
ran for governor on that platform.

Farrell's case was big for her because it involved more than 100
marijuana plants. Farrell faced up to three years in prison.

Delayed by a flat tire, she had scurried into the courthouse 30
minutes after court started, clutching a pink leather briefcase and
trailed by two 19-year-olds she introduced as her assistants, Daniel
Samadi and Raymond Hay.

The pair of college students are Boy Fridays, answering her
cellphone, fetching her food, walking her dog and soothing her when
she gets tense.

Slender and small with olive coloring, her auburn hair pulled into a
ponytail, Margolin was in constant motion, biting her lips, rubbing
her chin, pulling at strands of hair.

She wore a black Armani pants suit and a sleeveless red top with a
plunging neckline, revealing a silver-blue lacy camisole and generous
cleavage. Frameless glasses perched on her nose.

At one end of the court hallway, she huddled with Farrell. Her
defense was that Farrell grew marijuana for medical reasons and had a
doctor's recommendation for it, as did three others who were part of
his marijuana "collective."

She had five witnesses prepared to testify that the amount Farrell
grew would produce an appropriate yield for his medical needs and
those of the three other patients.

At the other end of the hallway, the prosecutor was meeting with the
police officers who had arrested Farrell.

The prosecutor had just learned that Farrell had a current doctor's
recommendation, which is similar to a prescription, for marijuana and
wanted to postpone the hearing.

But Margolin, who had prepared all weekend, opposed a delay.

"It's just not cool," Margolin said.

Hours passed as Margolin shuttled back and forth between her
witnesses and the prosecutor. Farrell was tense. Margolin told him
she would speak to the judge.

"I am going to tell the judge they are still jerking us around," she
said, flipping her ponytail.

She paused and grinned. "But I won't say it that way."

Margolin does not let hard work go to waste.

She studied relentlessly to achieve at Beverly Hills High, and the
payoff was Columbia University in New York, where she said she "just
felt the vibes" and fit in.

At Columbia she pulled seven-hour study stretches on Saturdays and
Sundays, was an editor on the college newspaper and taught a
political science class.

That helped when she applied to Harvard Law School, although her
application essay was risky. She argued that drugs should be
legalized, a position her father warned would doom her chance of admission.

She was admitted anyway.

Once there, "I was like the most eccentric person," she said. She
remembered feeling like a neon sign in a bright yellow vest and
tinted glasses in the classrooms.

"I studied a lot, and I didn't lie about it, and people would make
fun of me for it," she said. "People at Harvard pretended they didn't
have to work because they were geniuses. "

She pursed her lips sideways and fiddled with a strand of hair. "They
called me the Dirty Librarian because I swore and wore glasses."

She said she was not intimidated by some of the bullying law
professors because her mother's boyfriends over the years had made
her used to nasty lawyers.

The title of her law school thesis was "The Right to Get High."

She passed the bar on the first try: "It was like a miracle," she said.

Munching on scrambled eggs and sausages her assistants bought from
the courthouse cafeteria, Margolin tapped her patent leather toe
steadily and sipped V8 juice.

Samadi asked if she was nervous.

"No, I am OK," she replied. But the waiting was wearing.

"It's like ridiculous."

Although Samadi and Hay are nearly a decade younger than Margolin,
they hover over her paternally. They drive her to court appearances,
a valued task given Margolin's tendency to get lost. Her mother
remembers the time she called from Encino and complained she couldn't
find Pacific Coast Highway.

A woman in the jury pool in one of Margolin's cases once mistook the
pair for gang members.

"They are Persian Jews from Beverly Hills," Margolin said. "She
thought they were Hispanic."

After several hallway conferences in Farrell's case, the prosecutor
agreed to drop the charges. Margolin, ecstatic, clapped her hands as
she told Farrell the news.

Her father arrived as she headed into the courtroom. A lawyer whose
name is almost synonymous with marijuana law, Bruce Margolin sat in a
middle row to watch his daughter.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Dennis J. Landin dismissed
the charges, but that was not enough for Margolin. She asked that
police return the marijuana plants and the growing equipment. With no
objection from the prosecutor, the judge agreed to the order.

"Your daughter is a beauty," a lawyer in the courtroom whispered to her father.

"Thank you," the elder Margolin replied.

"And a damn good lawyer."

"Thank you."

Outside, Allison Margolin was jubilant. "This was like amazing. They
don't usually say no objection" to returning the plants.

Then she noticed her father's Cole Haan shoes, which she had bought
him. "Dad, you're wearing your Father's Day shoes!"

Margolin said he feels "validated" that his daughter embraces his
battle for marijuana rights and chose to follow his career path,
"although it is hard job, fraught with all kinds of frustrations I
don't want for her."

Being the daughter of a prominent marijuana activist, Margolin was
well versed in drug lore from her early years. She wrote a school
paper about the Colombian drug trade when she was 12.

In high school, "people would always ask me if I could get them pot,"
but "I didn't allow marijuana smoking in my environment. I was very straight."

Margolin said her father was a "marijuana and psychedelic purist" who
lectured her about the evils of alcohol.

Her parents divorced when she was 2, and both are on their third
marriages. Margolin has three stepsisters, two half sisters and one
half brother, ranging in age from 6 months to 15 years.

Having multiple parents "sucked," she said, "but now it is good."

"The new husband is the best," she said, referring to her mother's
third husband, Jeffrey Sklan, a criminal defense lawyer.

Margolin worked six months for her father's firm after passing the
bar, then quit and refused to speak to him for a while.

"My dad is an anti-nepotism kind of person," she said, explaining her
unhappy tenure at his firm. She characterized their relationship as
"kind of competitive."

But on the day of Margolin's triumph in court, Bruce Margolin seemed
merely proud. He wanted to buy her and her witnesses lunch to
celebrate. They agreed to meet at a restaurant near Chinatown.

When Margolin approached her black BMW with a reporter, Samadi and
Hay went to work on the seats, clearing out the workout clothes,
empty water bottles and wrappers.

Margolin confided that she has a physician's recommendation for
medical marijuana for a mild ailment she preferred not to disclose,
"but I wouldn't want people to make an issue of it."

Santa Monica Deputy City Atty. Patrick Brooks, who has been her
opposing counsel, said he teases her about her ads, which he
described as "clever" and effective.

"She is young and very smart and very hardworking and very
committed," Brooks said. "A lot of younger attorneys are afraid to go
to court, but she is confident in court and not afraid to go to trial."

Geoffrey Lewin, a Los Angeles County deputy district attorney, said
Margolin was the winner in one of only four cases he has lost in his
career, a medical marijuana case.

Some prosecutors "see me, and they like underestimate me and they
don't prepare," said Margolin, who works out of her mother's law firm
in Beverly Hills. Her mother, Elyse Margolin, is a family law attorney.

Allison Margolin has won acquittals in two of her four trials, and
the other two produced compromises she counted as victories. In one,
she got the equivalent of a traffic citation with no restitution for
a drunk driving defendant who had hit three parked cars. Like most
criminal defense lawyers, she resolves the bulk of her cases with
plea bargains or, as in Farrell's case, by getting the charges dismissed.

After celebrating Farrell's victory with her father, Margolin headed
home to the Fairfax district to change for an afternoon workout.

She and her assistants pulled up in front of the Spanish-style
bungalow she shares with her husband, physician Steven Kilmann.
Margolin asked Samadi to help find her orange-striped workout bra in
the chaos of the car. He plucked the bra from the floor of the front seat.

Her workout was a steep climb in a Beverly Hills park on the edge of
a neighborhood of mansions. She believes buying one of the mansions
is achievable now that her client base and notoriety are growing.

For a client caught with more than 100 plants, she usually charges a
$10,000 fee. She also has done cases for free, but confesses to
aspiring to wear "only Chanel" suits.

"I plan to make a lot of money," she said matter-of-factly.