Ron Malone, ’71

Partner at Shartsis, Friese & Ginsburg

If you've never wanted to be a horse you might change your mind when you see Circle Oak Ranch, Ron and Sara Malone's haven for horses in Sonoma County. On 33 acres, performance horses (racing, cutting, jumping, dressage, etc.) are rehabilitated from injuries or pampered in their retirement. The grounds are a horse's Santa Clara University: wisteria dripping from pergolas (Sara's gardening talents), therapeutic pools, riding and exercise trails, and three barns.

Malone has been talking about retiring for the past ten years and devoting himself to his "next professional goal": to be a champion cutting horse rider. But billion dollar trust cases keep landing in his lap. "I feel loyalty to my firm and I've worked really hard and have developed a national reputation in a niche area. Whenever this kind of problem comes up involving a charitable trust, I'm on the short list. And it took a long time to get on the short list," he says.

The niche area is "donor intent" cases in which charities are alleged to be spending donated money contrary to the intent of the donor or a donor's charitable goals are otherwise thwarted.

His first blockbuster case was the high profile Buck Trust case. Beryl Buck died in 1975 and left a trust, then valued at around $11 million, to benefit the poor of Marin County. By 1984, the trust had grown to more than $400 million and every charity in the Bay Area was clamoring for a piece. The San Francisco Foundation, which administered it, sued to use the money to help the poor outside of Marin under the doctrine of cy pres. In a highly publicized six-month trial in 1986, Malone prevailed and the funds are now given only to charities in Marin, as set forth in Buck's will.

Malone, who grew up in Mountain View, worked his way through San Jose State (BA, Political Science, 1968) as a suit salesman and food service worker. The son of a Santa Clara County homicide detective, he wanted to become an FBI agent ("I knew who the bad guys are" he says). His mother convinced him that if he went to law school he could be an FBI agent or a prosecutor. Despite his only average undergraduate grades, Santa Clara School of Law "took a chance on me," he says, admitting him and giving him scholarships. He repaid its trust, earning top honors. Malone graduated magna cum laude, number two in his class, and received the Outstanding Graduate Award, which hangs on the wall of his home office to this day.

After law school, Malone joined the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington DC and worked for three years prosecuting labor racketeering cases. He led the federal prosecution against W.A. "Tony" Boyle, president of the United Mine Workers of America, for the murder of his rival, Joseph Yablonski, his wife, and 25-year-old daughter, who were all shot in their beds as they slept.

In 1974, Malone was awarded a Justice Department fellowship for an LLM program at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government. The fellowship required he work for Justice for another three years. So rather than pursue his plans to teach law school, he spent the next three years investigating the bad guys in the federal government: the CIA, which had illegally opened the mail of suspected "reds" during the cold war, people who left briefcases of cash lying around (intended for the infamous CREEP – the Committee to Re-Elect the President – Nixon), and the Nixon administration itself. Malone was the senior trial attorney for the Watergate Special Prosecution Force in the last 10 months of the Watergate investigation.

After serving as a speech writer and criminal justice policy advisor to two Attorneys General, in 1977 Malone returned to the Bay Area and joined Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe in San Francisco. He worked there until 1991, when he joined his current firm, Shartsis Friese LLP.

As a kid, Malone had listened to his father, Bob, talk about how he treated suspects with respect and courtesy and how many murder suspects eventually confessed to "my new friend, Bob." Malone has the same low key approach in the cases he tries (he calls it "fairly low key but backed up by hours of prep work"). Malone loves talking to judges and juries. "I do it the same way every time. I use common sense. I keep it simple, and I appeal to every person's sense of fairness. If, at the end of the day, the finder of fact believes that my client was an honorable person trying to do the right thing, the judge and jury will find a way of making the law fit the right result. You don't have to be Clarence Darrow to do that."

Over the last few years, Malone has been in the national spotlight for his work on what the Wall Street Journal called "the largest and most important donor intent case in the history of American philanthropy." Malone represented the Robertson family, which had given a gift eventually totaling $880 million in assets to Princeton University. They alleged that Princeton was abusing the endowment and the donors' trust . Malone, who felt the abuse was obvious, envisioned that the representation would involve a brief investigation, a demand and a short conversation with the university's president—and maybe $25,000 in attorneys' fees. But Princeton dug in its heels, lawyered up (they sent 16 lawyers to the summary judgment hearing) and, after spending over $40 million in lawyers' fees (the plaintiffs spent the same), agreed last December to pay back $101 million to the family foundation.

Why do some charities misuse donations? "Arrogance," says Malone, "and for the same reason people commit first degree murder – they don't think they'll get caught. Charities that accept and then misuse these restricted gifts really think they are on the side of the angels. and that they know so much more than the donors about what charitable goals are important. The ends justify the means," he says. Plus, "they don't expect people to read their emails."

Malone, who is listed in Best Lawyers in America, says he owes "a tremendous debt of gratitude to Santa Clara because they took a chance on me. By the first semester I really found my calling. Some of my professors took me under their wings, really encouraged me and taught me how to think like a lawyer. The entire faculty helped instill in every student a real sense of community service and encouraged us to use the law not just to make a living but to do good. I've always felt that no matter what I've done I've always worn the white hat. I've always wanted to do what is right."

A cowboy hat is awaiting Malone at his ranch in Petaluma, where Sara now enjoys riding, gardening (she is a master gardener) and doing community service work after spending two decades on Wall Street. The couple's two daughters, Molly and Katie, are now both off at college—Molly at UC-Berkeley and Katie at Florida Atlantic.