Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr partner Bill Lee is best known as an elite patent litigator, Apple's go-to lawyer in the smartphone wars.

But he's in court today in Massachusetts on a very different matter—deciding the fate of an iconic Norman Rockwell painting, “Shuffleton's Barbershop,” and by extension, the museum that has owned it for decades.

Lee represents the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which wants to sell the painting and 39 other works of art to raise $55 million. (Cue horrified gasps from the museum community.)

Founded in 1903, the art, science and history museum has fallen on hard times. In recent decades, Berkshire County's population has declined, and GE—once the museum's major corporate sponsor—has shuttered its local plants and left the area. Poverty in Pittsfield is rampant. At the same time, other local museums and cultural institutions competing for donations have proliferated.

The result: The museum can't make ends meet. It's running a deficit of more than $1 million every year, and its endowment is almost gone. Not to mention the roof leaks, there are septic system problems and mold in the art storage rooms.

The museum's choice was bleak. Shut down or sell of some its collection to raise money and reinvent itself.

In the museum world, apparently it's anathema to even consider selling one's art (unless you use the money to buy new art, in which case it's OK). As the American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors put it in a joint statement to The New York Times, “One of the most fundamental and longstanding principles of the museum field is that a collection is held in the public trust and must not be treated as a disposable financial asset.”

Which is very high-minded and nice, except when you're broke. How is the public supposed to see the paintings if the museum can't pay its electric bill?

Rockwell's descendants weren't happy about the plan either. “When our father and grandfather gave the painting to the Museum in 1958 he wanted it to be appreciated by his neighbors in the Berkshires. Norman Rockwell didn't give it to finance the Museum's renovation plans. He gave it hoping the people of the Berkshires would see it and enjoy it,” they wrote to the Berkshire Eagle last summer.

In October, they joined with four museum members and filed suit in Berkshire County Superior Court to stop the sale. A second group of private plaintiffs filed another suit five days later. Five days after that, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey jumped in backing the plaintiffs.

Lee declined comment, but in court papers, he made it clear that after two years of community input and financial analysis, “the museum has determined that it is impossible or impractical to continue operating as a museum of art, history and science without selling up to 40 of these works.”

The museum, which has 40,000 works in its collection, sees itself as a “window into the world” for local residents, from the aquarium in its basement to objects including an Egyptian mummy, revolutionary war musket and fur suit worn by the first North Pole explorer. It's not just a place to look at paintings.

Last month, the museum won over AG Healey and the Rockwell descendants with an inspired compromise. Lee wrote that the museum recognizes “there is a strong public attachment to 'Shuffleton's Barbershop' and a desire by many that it remain on public view in the United States.”

So Lee's client has found another (unnamed) museum to buy the painting. The institution agreed to loan it for 18 to 24 months to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Once the buyer gets it back, it promises to display the painting “in a place of prominence within its museum.”

Still, some of the private plaintiffs, who are represented by lawyers including Foley Hoag partner Michael B. Keating, continue to oppose the deal.

Approval now is up to Justice David A. Lowy of the Supreme Judicial Court of Suffolk County, who will hear the case at noon today in his role as a “single justice,” which according to the Berkshire Eagle is a duty that rotates among members of the state's highest court on a monthly basis.

As Healy put it in her court filing, the AG's office now “believes that, in these circumstances, the museum has reasonably concluded that it does not have any alternative sources for the significant infusion of funds it needs in order to continue to fulfill its mission, and the museum cannot practicably survive without lifting or amending the restrictions on at least some of the works of art to permit their sale.”

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Lateral Watch

It's official: David Wales Jr. has left Jones Day, where he led the firm's antitrust practice, to join Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.

“I've worked with and across from the lawyers at Skadden and its antitrust practice and have always had the utmost respect for them,” Wales told my colleagues at The American Lawyer on Monday. “Skadden really has leading global practices across the board. Not only antitrust, but M&A, litigation [and] white collar. And being part of that was just an opportunity that I could not pass up.”

The former U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey, Paul Fishman, has joined Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer as a partner in New York, where he will the lead the firm's crisis management and strategic response team.

Best-known as the prosecutor in New Jersey's “Bridgegate” scandal, Fishman described Arnold & Porter as a firm with “an extraordinary reputation, both with client service and for the way in which it views lawyers' responsibility to society.”

That's one way to put it.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon got cranky with a lawyer for third-party Sony. “Sir, when I talk, you stop,” Leon told John Cove, adding that Shearman & Sterling has many lawyers, and if Cove could not attend tomorrow, he could ask someone to come in his place.

Is the statute of limitations for Attorney General Eric Schneiderman's massive case six years or three?

The three whistleblowers, who get a combined $83 million, are represented by Labaton Sucharow LLP partner Jordan Thomas in New York.

Namely, who is liable.

The team is splitting from litigation boutique Manion Gaynor & Manning, and represents clients including Koch Industries and food services giant Sodexo.

Where Pennsylvania Republicans try (again) to keep their gerrymandered map, and lose (again).