ft.com/alphaville

Matthew Goldstein, freshly installed at Reuters, notes the latest twist in the ongoing Alan Stanford saga:

The R. Allen Stanford legal defense story keeps getting stranger and stranger.

While the securities world waits for the inevitable indictment of the Texas financier, he keeps going through lawyers with the same speed the alleged Ponzi mastermind was said to date women. Last week Stanford replaced his civil litigation defense team with a group of lawyers from the little-known Washington, D.C.-based law firm The Gulf Law Group.

The Gulf firm bills itself as a “full-service firm,” but it mainly appears to be a law firm specializing in admiralty and maritime law.

Indeed. Check out the Gulf Law Group website imagery:

It’s not just the pictures though. The entire website has a certain feel to it… it’s Stanfordesque, one might even say.  By which we mean that detail - of anything but the most superficial stuff - is extremely thin on the ground.

For starters, there are only four pages to the whole site. Which is most odd, for a firm with an apparently extremely comprehensive practice. According to the “services” page of the Gulf Law website, the firm has an - err, rather diverse, repertoire of expertise in: Admiralty & Maritime, Appellate Litigation - State and Federal, Assisted Living Facility Litigation, Aviation, Bankruptcy, Business General Casualty and Commerical Litigation, Class Action and Mass Tort, Environmental and Toxic Tort, Government Procurement, Healthcare, Hurricane-Catastophe Litigation, Media Relations, Medical Malpractice, Nursing Home Litigation, Premises Liability, Produce Liability, Workers’ Compensation and Subrogation.

Then there’s the news and events page, which is also rather wanting. There are just four press releases on it - only going back as far as August 2008. And each appears to be a rather cursory rehash of  extant official press releases from the Supreme Court.

The really intriguing thing though is this, right in the bottom left-hand corner of the website:

For those who can’t quite read it, it says, “Site by Qorvis”. Would that be Qorvis as in Qorvis the Communications Agency representing the public relations interests of Sir Allen?