Sidebar

Street circuits are especially challenging, he added. Unlike a track that is specifically designed for racing, such as Sonoma’s Infineon Raceway, races run through city streets don’t leave a lot of room for error. A mistake or a mechanical problem that puts you in contact with a guardrail, he said, can take you out of the race. “The cars are fragile. Things break if you have contact with something.”

Locke ended 10th out of 22 cars starting in Monaco. In a couple of weeks, he will relive some of that thrill in the streets of old town Las Vegas � albeit sans some of the historical setting � as the Vegas Historic Grand Prix races begin April 6.

� Petra Pasternak

AND YOU’LL BE PAID IN TOKENS

Long touted as the place where “a kid can be a kid,” Chuck E. Cheese’s is now also the place that can cause a respected antitrust, IP and securities litigator to pick up and move his practice from a high-end boutique to a top Am Law 100 firm.

At least that’s the case for Samuel Miller, who was lured to Sidley Austin from San Francisco’s Folger Levin & Kahn last week � in part because of a Sidley lawyer who served as co-counsel in a long ago dispute involving the pizza party place.

In the early 1980s case, Miller, then with Morrison & Foerster, was representing a client in a contract dispute with Chuck E. Cheese’s when he shared the counsel’s table with Peter Ostroff, now head of Sidley’s West Coast litigation practice. The case settled, but the experience stuck with both men.

Miller said he gets a lot of calls from firms and recruiters, but when he heard Ostroff’s name mentioned by one such caller, he decided to listen.

“It’s the first time I said I was willing to explore this,” said Miller, 58, who joined Folger Levin in 1994 as one of the boutique’s first lateral hires.

Before that, in a slightly more high-profile case than the one involving Chuck E. Cheese’s, Miller spent a year leading the Department of Justice’s antitrust investigation of Microsoft. In the 20 years before, while at MoFo, he handled a variety of antitrust, joint venture, trade secret and copyright disputes.

“I’ve always admired him, sometimes up close and personal and sometimes from afar,” said Ostroff. “He’s going to be a central player in a very significant antitrust practice.”

Miller said it was a difficult decision to leave Folger Levin, which has about 70 lawyers, and offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. But the breadth and depth of Sidley’s more than 1,700 attorneys all over the world was more attractive.

“Folger is a fantastic firm,” he said. “The scale of practice just doesn’t match Sidley.”

Sidley has about 50 lawyers in its San Francisco office, where Miller will be working.

� Zusha Elinson