By Paul Elias

It didn't take long for William Alsup to earn a reputation as a rising star. Three months on the bench, to be exact.

But it did take a lot of hard work, namely getting up to speed on a massive securities class action that was transferred to him soon after he joined the Northern District.

"I've done quite a lot of work on this case," he told the assembled lawyers at a Nov. 4 hearing called to vet lead plaintiff candidates in In re Network Associates Inc., 99-1729, "so it's not like I'm starting from scratch."

Indeed, from that hearing arose an opinion that is being hailed as a model for choosing lead plaintiffs in the future.

"It's a Cy Young award-winning opinion," said Network Associates' attorney, Boris Feldman, a partner with Palo Alto's Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. "It's an impressive first securities opinion."

Even Reed Kathrein, a partner in the San Francisco office of Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, conceded the document was impressively written. And Alsup was ruling against him.

"We don't agree with it," Kathrein said. "But it is well-written. Obviously, he put a lot of thought into it."

As for Alsup, he knows he's doing something different. "I recognize that there are other courts that have gone the other way," he said at the Nov. 4 hearing, "but I don't think they did it right."

Such confidence extends to the rest of his calendar, including a case involving the Perishable Agricultural Commodities Act. On Nov. 10, the novice judge reversed a bankruptcy court ruling that had favored the Lyon's Restaurant chain against its produce vendor, Royal Foods Co. The bankruptcy court held that other creditors were to get paid before Royal, which was owed $1.6 million. But Alsup, wading into a murky area of the law, said that Lyon's should have put the money in a trust, which would move Royal to the front of the line.

"The court agrees that the indications from the Department of Agriculture on this issue are troubling," Alsup wrote, because the act does not specifically mention restaurants. But he noted the law was written 70 years ago when "restaurants were likely at the periphery of the act's central concerns. . . . Moreover, chain restaurants, like Lyon's, were not prevalent at the time, if they existed at all."

He is also handling two criminal cases of the nearly 30 that have been filed in connection with the burgeoning bribery scandal at the San Francisco Housing Authority, where the government charges that employees handed out low-income housing in exchange for bribes.

Alsup clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and did civil rights work in the South before joining Morrison & Foerster in 1973. He put in two years at the Office of the Solicitor General before returning to MoFo. Sen. Barbara Boxer recommended him for the federal judgeship last year.

Counsel say they consider Alsup a model of Southern civility and charm.

The Nov. 4 securities hearing, for instance, started at 4 p.m. and went to 8 p.m. He told the 15 attorneys assembled that "with all of these people here today, you're going to have to forgive me because I'm going to ask you to do it according to my agenda."