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A Million Reasons to Quit the Firm

Two associates from Los Angeles' Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro win 'The Amazing Race'

Renee Deger
The Recorder
December 20, 2001

Move over, Stacey Stillman. Associates dreaming of chucking the law for fame, fortune and adventure now have Robert Frisbee and Brennan Swain to look up to.

Frisbee and Swain are the $1 million winners of the premier season of CBS' reality TV show, "The Amazing Race."

Less than three months ago, however, the dynamic legal duo was sweating away the hours as associates at Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro in Los Angeles.

"The overall feeling was at first surreal -- it was hard to believe it actually happened," Frisbee said about winning.

"Now I just feel gratitude -- not only to have the money to pursue other things but to have seen the world in a way in which I would never have seen it."

They, of course, weren't the first associates to make the casting cut on reality TV.

The premier season of "Survivor," another CBS creation, featured associate Stacey Stillman, who at the time was working for San Francisco-based Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. She then moved to Palo Alto, Calif.-based Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati but has since left that firm.

Stillman sued CBS and its producer, alleging the show was rigged against her, and that matter is still pending. A call to the office of her attorney in the matter was not returned by press time. CBS filed suit as well, claiming breach of contract, and that matter, too, is pending.

So far, Frisbee and Swain have no complaints about their experience. They even stoked the lawyer angle in their video pitch to be contestants. "We reminded them that people love to hate lawyers," Swain said.

To win "The Amazing Race," Frisbee, 28, and Swain, 30, made a mad sprint across Flushing Meadows Park in New York's borough of Queens to finish the 31-day race. The final episode aired Nov. 12.

During filming, pairs raced one another, sometimes across oceans and continents, to reach clues on where the race would take them next. Each week, the pair that finished last was eliminated.

The 34,312-mile trek took the teams around the globe, hitting places like Zambia, Tunisia, India and Thailand and finishing in New York City, where the race started.

They took a leave of absence while the show was being filmed in March and April, but contestants had to keep mum about their fate. So the winning pair has had nine months of sitting on the big news and getting ready for the media spotlight. They haven't yet received the money.

But when the show began to air, the two lawyers quit Jeffer Mangels -- Frisbee in September and Swain in October -- to focus on new opportunities.

Frisbee, who had done some modeling after finishing law school, will focus more on that career. Swain, who had acted in commercials and a pilot after finishing law school, is going to pursue an acting career.

Former colleagues at Jeffer Mangels say the pair is missed but that the good fortune is well deserved.

"They're the sweetest guys you'd ever want to know -- never said a bad word toward anyone," said Dianne Chubb, a Jeffer Mangels IP associate.

"We're happy that they won because it couldn't happen to better people," she added.

The newest reality TV stars were known to be adventurous but the law may run deeper in their veins than they think.

Now famous and often recognized for what he calls the "world's greatest and most expensive home movie," Frisbee misses the collegiality of working at the firm and the structure of knowing what each day had in store.

"Now you're always flying by the seat of your pants," he said.

Meanwhile, Swain catches himself asking patent-related questions at odd times. "I'd see how something works and I'd wonder whether it was patented."