March 14, 1993

WHEN the managing partners of most of the nation's top law firms gathered recently, the conversation turned to overseas expansion and the hot competition for multinational clients. "Someone said, 'You know, Baker & McKenzie did it right,' " recalled the lawyers' host, Steven Brill, editor of The American Lawyer. "And no one disagreed." For many at the meeting, it was a case of bowing to the weight of the evidence, even if it was against their instincts. Skeptics have long derided Baker & McKenzie's unusual strategy of knitting lawyers in many countries into a confederation of offices, each of which keeps most of what it earns rather than sending it on to headquarters. Likening Baker to a legendary fast-food franchisor, some call the firm McLaw or McFirm.

From the moment a twisted fragment of a yellow rental van led Federal agents to arrest a young Palestinian drifter, the investigation of the World Trade Center bombing veered into the complex realm of Middle Eastern politics, from the deeply held grudges of displaced Palestinians, to the aspirations to power of Islamic fundamentalists. Two of the young men arrested so far -- Mohammed A. Salameh and Nidal A. Ayyad -- came from families that fled their West Bank homes around the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to be cast into an unsought, and often unwelcoming, diaspora.

The program called for a new home for Yale University's Center for International and Area Studies, a clearinghouse for hundreds of faculty members, students and visiting scholars -- in other words, a major institutional structure. But the context was the gracious old residential neighborhood of Hillhouse Avenue in New Haven. The answer devised by Edward Larrabee Barnes/John M. Y. Lee, Architects of Manhattan is a three-story building clad in a light salmon-colored brick, framed by bands of rusticated limestone. At each corner will be suites for individual study groups; Africa, for example, in one corner, Asia in another. What will draw members of these separate groups together are the common areas at the center of the building, particularly the lounge, with its large arched windows, which Mr. Barnes likened to the parlor floor in an old house.

FOR Tabitha Soren, the 25-year-old star of MTV News, it had been a remarkably successful day. She had spent the morning at Rutgers University preparing a special news segment on Bill Clinton's national service plan, which he had introduced in a speech that afternoon. Everywhere she had gone, adoring teen-agers had demanded her autograph. And after the speech, when the rest of the press corps had been herded into the back of the hall, she had been ushered into an exclusive interview with the President. Still, when it was all over, Ms. Soren couldn't quite suppress a tiny, half-serious scowl of disappointment. Not because the interview had gone badly; in fact, it had gone quite well.

A Brooklyn landlord, Jeno Jakabovits, has been ordered to give priority to prospective tenants who are black or Hispanic, after a jury found him and others liable for discrimination. The case was brought by the Open Housing Center, a private agency, against Mr. Jakabovits; another Brooklyn landlord, Benjamin Breitman; A M Realty of Brooklyn, one of its brokers and two of its agents. Last May, a Federal jury in Uniondale, L.I., awarded $15,350 in damages. This month, a Federal judge, Arthur D. Spatt, further ordered Mr. Jakabovits to give priority to black and Hispanic apartment seekers for every fourth vacancy in 7 of his 14 apartment buildings over two years.