By Jordan Vega · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, January 2011
In late January 2011, TexasLawyer.com staff reporter Miriam Rozen published a profile of Ed Chernoff — the Houston-based defense lawyer hired within 48 hours of Michael Jackson’s June 2009 death to represent Dr. Conrad Murray. The piece captured Chernoff’s life in the press bubble around the upcoming manslaughter trial: he had rented an apartment in Hollywood, stopped answering phone calls from unknown numbers, and his Houston firm had been substantially reorganized around the case. The original FishbowlLA framing was structurally interested in the press-management mechanics of one of the era’s most high-profile criminal cases.
Then
Chernoff and partner Bill Stradley at Stradely, Chernoff & Alford had been a Houston criminal-defense firm with substantial high-profile case experience prior to the Jackson matter. The post-Jackson-death engagement had quickly absorbed substantial firm resources — the original FishbowlLA framing noted that the defense was forcing “major case-juggling among the five lawyers at the firm.”
The 300-cameras-instead-of-three quote — Chernoff describing the difference between an ordinary high-profile case and the Jackson case — captured the magnitude scale that the Jackson media ecosystem operated at. The 2009-2011 period had been the substantial post-mortem media cycle around Jackson’s death, with multiple parallel legal-and-cultural threads running simultaneously.
The manslaughter trial itself was scheduled for September 2011. Murray was charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with administering the propofol that had caused Jackson’s June 2009 cardiac arrest at his Holmby Hills home.
Miriam Rozen’s TexasLawyer.com piece was structurally a trade-press long-form profile — the kind of substantive lawyer-profile work that the legal-trade press was doing on high-profile defense counsel in the 2010s. The original FishbowlLA pickup was characteristic of FBLA’s role in surfacing trade-press long-form work to the broader LA media community.
Now
Conrad Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in November 2011, after a six-week trial in LA Superior Court that was broadcast live. He was sentenced to four years in jail; he served about two years due to California’s overcrowding-and-good-time-credit rules and was released in October 2013. His medical license was revoked in California, Texas, and Nevada. His subsequent career has included multiple unsuccessful attempts at media work and books.
Ed Chernoff has continued at the Houston firm — now Chernoff Law — across the years since. The post-Murray-trial period has included additional high-profile defense work, though nothing at the Jackson-trial scale of media attention.
Michael Jackson’s broader legal-and-cultural legacy has continued as one of the most-cited celebrity-death-and-legacy stories of the past quarter century. The Murray trial was the central criminal-law artifact of the post-2009 Jackson cycle, but it has been substantially supplemented by the 2019 Leaving Neverland documentary and the subsequent reconsideration of Jackson’s broader history.
The press-management dynamics the 2011 piece captured — single-defense-attorney facing a press cycle structurally larger than ordinary big-name cases produce — have aged into being a recurring template for subsequent celebrity-defense engagements. The original FishbowlLA framing of Chernoff renting a Hollywood apartment to manage the LA-side trial logistics reads now as a small documented moment of the kind of bi-coastal defense-counsel operational footprint that high-profile criminal cases periodically still produce.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.