Our next employee spotlight is our Founding Partner, Jeff Eckland. Here’s a Q&A with Jeff about his 40+ year career as a government contracts attorney, along with some personal tidbits.
Q: Tell us about your practice.
A: I am primarily a Government Contracts (“GC”) trial lawyer. As such, I am engaged in acquiring, trying, and/or appealing cases such as Franconia Associates v. United States, a case involving a Congressional breach of contract that I began pursuing in 1995 all the way to the United States Supreme Court and on which our firm continues to work, negotiating with Government lawyers damage claims from all parts of the country.
Q: What is your favorite case that you have worked on?
A: It is the second GC case I tried, Matter of Technical Ordnance, Inc. (“TKO”), a MN company that became my best client. I worked the case up and developed my penchant for demonstrative exhibits while staying at the Willard Hotel in WDC and tried it before the ASBCA in 1991. It involved a conversion of a default termination to a termination for convenience of a contract for TKO’s production of stabilizer units for Mark 46 torpedoes, which remain the NATO standard.
The Government had assembled a dozen witnesses to defend onerous inspections that had slowed TKO’s production to a virtual halt. Walking past these witnesses, lined up and down the hallway outside the courtroom awaiting their testimony, after I had massacred three of their colleagues during cross-examination, and knowing as I met their stares just how I was going to decimate each of their own appearances on the stand – and relishing the prospect of doing so – I knew that I had arrived as a GC trial lawyer.
I was therefore disappointed when, after realizing that I was proving TKO’s case through the Government’s own witnesses, the agency lawyer withdrew all remaining witnesses and rested. Following the ASBCA’s favorable decision, and at the next year’s West’s GC Conference, the case was awarded the “Bureaucratic Horror Story of the Year” Award. I was thereafter committed to GC litigation, hook, line, and sinker.
Q: What is your go to skyway lunch spot?
A: My favorite spots are on Sixth street between two skyways: 1) Murray’s Restaurant, where I prepped many trial witnesses and my parents became engaged; and 2) Lyon’s Pub, where Faegre’s Exxon Valdez Trial Team would gather and I closed many GC claims.
Q: Do you have a fun fact for the picture you chose to share?
A: This is a 2002 photo of the Eckland family, including Grandma Harriett Cutrer, taken after the rendering of the 9-0 favorable decision of the Supreme Court in Franconia Associates.