In the nearly 30 years Gentile has practiced law in Las Vegas, he has created a name for himself as a tough criminal defense attorney, specializing in white-collar crime, First Amendment law and homicide.

He has represented many well-known Las Vegas figures from former Clark County Commissioner Lance Malone to strip club owner Luis Hidalgo to developer Don Davidson and embattled Judge Elizabeth Halverson.

Gentile is more than a keen litigator. He is deeply involved in ethics debates and has taught in law schools around the country, including the Boyd School of Law.

Born in Chicago and educated at Depaul University (both his bachelor's and law degrees), Gentile spent two years as an associate dean of the National College of Criminal Defense Lawyers and Public Defenders in Houston before making Las Vegas his home.

Question: You just announced a move to a new law firm. Tell us about your new role.

Answer: Over the last 10 years or so my law firm continued to grow until about a year ago, when we had nine lawyers. It became obvious that we needed to continue our internal growth or join with some other firm that had services that we did not have and whose services we could complement.

For about the last 15 years most of what I have done has involved businesses and businessmen, either suing because they were defrauded or being investigated, or sued or prosecuted because there was a belief on the part of somebody — whether it be a government or private citizen — that they were involved with fraud.

A number of years ago, in response to Wall Street and some abuses that proceeded from Wall Street, Congress passed the Sarbanes Oxley Act. But that act created a whole new higher threshold for businessmen and businesses to comply with in order to stay out of trouble.

I've seen over the last 20 years tremendous growth as far as federal and state investigations and prosecutions of businesspeople who were operating in a way that they thought was totally appropriate in many cases, some not. But in many cases, they then ran afoul of state and federal regulators or state or federal prosecutors. So there's really been big growth in what's known as white-collar crime or white-collar fraud investigations and prosecutions.

We found that most of what we were doing for the last 15 years fell into that category. The Gordon & Silver firm, as well as a couple of others, recognized that they had a need to have their clients serviced and, in fact, referred a lot of work to us. It just became obvious that the time had arrived in Las Vegas for a major institutional law firm that had institutional corporate business clients, gaming clients, to expand and offer that service from within the firm itself — and Gordon & Silver made that move.

What do you hope to accomplish there?

It's a situation where one plus one will equal more than two. As a firm, we'd like to have it become obvious that we can handle matters of a much broader range and with greater efficiency than could be done without this ability within the firm. As for myself, I see myself pretty much doing what I have been doing, probably doing it more for the existing clients of Gordon & Silver as well as continuing to represent clients who are being referred by other law firms.

As far as what I've been doing, I don't see it really changing at all. I'm still spending my time involved in representing clients in investigations that did end up in litigation or representing clients in litigation because the investigations didn't work out the way we wanted them to.

I don't really see a change. We'll continue to do criminal defense work at the level that we have and continue representing our media clients in First Amendment situations. And as they arise, I suppose we'll continue to represent lawyers and doctors and elected officials in ethics and licensing matters.

Why did you decide to make this move and why now?

It actually took two years to make the decision. About two years ago I recognized that in order for me to continue to work at the level that I was working, I needed to grow my law firm. And you can't grow a law firm without having other people be owners of that law firm because they have to be motivated — it is a business.

It was really the three people that I designated as my future partners who persuaded me that it would be more efficient, and we could put out a better product, if we joined forces with another firm that already had the services in place that we were intending to grow into. I give them credit for basically teaching me.

About that time, I started speaking with Jeff Silver, and he said, "Why don't you join us?" And frankly, I dragged my feet — it's not like I had nothing to do; I've kind of been busy in courtrooms these last couple of years.

But the thought was there, and about a year ago I started to think about it very, very seriously, and I actually hired an attorney who was a managing partner of one of the larger law firms in Nevada, and he coached me through it. He never told me what to do, but he asked me some great questions that I had to answer. It took about a year, and I answered them all, and I came back to Jeff and I said, "Yeah it's right, let's do it."

Your name is not being added to the firm. Why is that and does that matter to you?

Actually, they offered to do that. Jerry and Jeff both said, "Why don't we change the name of the firm?" I don't see the need for that. Gordon & Silver has been in existence for 40 years. It has been in existence as Gordon & Silver for most of that time. It has an institutional recognition, and I don't have a problem with that — my ego isn't that big. I don't think it's going to be very difficult for my clients to find me. I'm not a well-kept secret, that's for sure.

If you take a look at the great law firms in the United States, just because of a new partner, even a lateral partner, even a merger of law firms takes place, it doesn't mean they change the name of the law firm. There's a certain stability that comes from that. Some of the very finest lawyers in the United States that do what I do for a living are not on the mastheads of their firms. Winston and Strawn didn't change its name when Dan Webb joined it. I could give you a lot of other examples. Ropes and Gray, the oldest firm in the United States, didn't change its name when Sam Buffone or Dave Stewart became partners in that firm. Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco has a man by the name of Jim Brosnahan who is probably one of the best trial lawyers in the United States, but the name of the firm is not Morrison and Foerster and Brosnahan. So it's really not necessary.

What's necessary is that the quality that has become identified as part of Gordon & Silver not just remains the same but grows.

What do you think about the Las Vegas trend of firm consolidation?

I've thought a lot about that. If you see the practice of the law as a profession, that the delivery of legal services to the consumers of legal services is a business — it ought to be treated like a business by the people who are involved in providing those legal services. Businesspeople, the clients of the firm, or even individuals have a right to expect the very best service you can provide at the most efficient level that you can provide it.

I think that for many, many years — too many years, maybe 100 years — the practice of law has been tied to the billable hour. That is coming into serious review at this point by lawyers and by ethics professors and by bar associations. We're at a stage where efficiency really matters and because efficiency really matters, I think you're going to see a continuation of the consolidation of law firms. I think that the ones that make sense are the ones that will result in the ability to provide the client of the firm — the resulting firm — the best services at a price that is not more than the value that the service represents.

So I think it's inevitable. There will continue to be small practitioners in certain areas. If you are practicing criminal defense work, if you're practicing not in corporate board rooms but with individual clients, that's not going to merge well except with other lawyers that do the same thing. So each of you get the efficiencies that come with the economies of scale.

But for the most part, particularly in law firms that have businesses and institutions as clients, I think that consolidation is inevitable and it's going to continue — and it's a good thing.

In the wake of the L.A. Times series a year ago, what is your opinion of the state of the Nevada legal system, especially its court system?

I've been in Nevada practicing law since 1979. I could tell you that without a doubt we have absolutely the best quality legal minds on our courts today that we have ever had. There might be an exception or two to that, but there were a lot of exceptions to that in the past.

It has steadily improved. I think the judges that I see working today, if you go into that courthouse at 5 o'clock, they're going to be there. If you go into that courthouse at 8 o'clock in the morning, a lot of them will be there. Most of them will be there before the official starting time of their courtroom, that's for sure. Many of them — most of them — have proven their mettle as practitioners in court. So the old days of a political appointment because of belonging to the right party or having done a favor for somebody, if they're not over they're certainly not visible, and they're accompanied by the skills that a judge needs to have and those skills were obtained appearing before other judges on contested matters. So in that sense, I think it's great.

I am not a big believer in appointed-judge systems. I think the electorate can be trusted. I don't like the appointed-judge system because sometimes mediocrity not only won't be weeded out, but it can sustain itself. It can remain there a long, long time.

I've been looking at the proposals that have been coming out of our most recent Legislature. I think that there's some good things in it, but it frightens me a little bit because, frankly, ultimately the people have to have the power to remove a judge, and the best way to do that is in an election.

I am not real fond of the Judicial Discipline Commission and its system. I know that it's part of Nevada, and it's going to remain there, but it definitely needs to have more in the way of due process rules and regulations than it does have.

Any plans to run for an elected position yourself?

No, I have plans to run from one. I have absolutely no desire to be a judge. I don't think I'd be a good judge. The reason I don't think I'd be a good judge is because I am at my core an advocate. The worst judge is a judge who tries to place himself into the case that's being tried before them by thinking he knows more about it or could do a better job than the lawyer who has spent the last two years trying to learn it and work it.

As far as any other elected positions, I've never had an appetite for that. I'd like to serve in government, I really would like to do that. I teach at the law school, and while that might not be serving in government, it is serving the community. I don't think there's any doubt about that. I don't do it for the money.

I teach trial advocacy and trial evidence at the law school, and I have been teaching at our law school — I guess I was the first adjunct professor appointed to the school — but I've been teaching in other places. I teach at Cardozo Law School in New York; I've taught at a lot of different law schools in the United States in the area of trial advocacy.

So that's about all I have done as far as contributing to the community. I'd like to do more but it is just not in me to do it by running for election for anything. If I were asked to serve, I might do that. But it would have to be not only something that I felt I could do, but could do well.

You have said in the past that you are very fond of the Boyd School of Law. What do you think it has brought to this community?

It has, without a doubt, increased the scholarship and the competition in our community.

In Southern Nevada it has been a wonderful thing. I have judges ask me all the time to refer them students who can act as clerks or summer interns. I can tell you that I had a little bit of an edge because I teach at the school, and so I got to see the talent. But I've taught at other schools — I taught at Harvard once in the same exact class, the intensive trial advocacy, and I can tell you that the quality of our students — the ones who I have had hands-on experience with in my courses — in my opinion, were superior to what I encountered at Harvard.

Now, I grant you that I am involved in trial advocacy and trial evidence, and you know I don't teach how to draft a trust for somebody who has $800 billion that they want to protect over the next 42 generations of their family. Maybe Boyd is not the school for that. But I think that the public is served because the more good lawyers we put out on the street, the more access the public has to a lawyer, most likely it will drive down the cost of obtaining a lawyer to represent you. That is an important thing, particularly for the individual out there who is not hiring a lawyer for their business, but perhaps for something personal for them and their family.

When I first came to Las Vegas it was my impression that it was very much a "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" bar — not a saloon bar, a lawyer bar. That's not the case anymore.

The pro bono work that's done as a result of the increase in the legal community has definitely benefited the society as a whole. There are a lot more lawyers out there now who can, and want to, take on important issues that are communitywide issues where there isn't any money in it, but the issue is important. That's something that having a law school brings to the community that cannot be duplicated without a law school — just can't be done.

I was actually on the Board of Governors of the bar when we took up for the first time the idea of a law school, and I was a proponent of it. I won't name the school, but there was a school from California that came and made a proposal and I led the charge rejecting it. The reason I rejected it was because we have a 24-hour city, we have a 24-hour society. I knew then, and it turned out to be true, that there were many people who had jobs in the gaming industry, many people who had jobs as entertainers, many people who had jobs in law enforcement, that would take the opportunity to go to law school, if they could go to school at hours that complemented their work schedule because they had to work to be able to afford to go to law school.

The original proposal would not have included a night school. I said there's no way, that can't work, and we should not spend 10 cents of public money supporting a school that isn't going to really be available and affordable to everybody.

I've had a number of policemen in my trial advocacy class and evidence class, I've had a number of entertainers, dancers and a number of people in the gaming industry. Some of them had jobs on the floor, some of them had jobs in the corporate offices, and they have all come through my evidence and trial-advocacy classes.

So, if I'm getting them, everybody else is getting them as well. That is something that is so important to the culture and the economy of Southern Nevada. I really can't point to another institution that could even equal it, at least in my opinion. I mean, all education is great, and all professional education is great, but I think that the impact a lawyer can make and a law school can make is every bit as great and probably costs a lot less than a medical school, for example.

We are not Houston. We are not going to have a string of university medical schools across the street from each other for two miles of road. That isn't going to happen here, but you don't need that to make that kind of an impact when you're dealing with the law and law schools.

What do you get out of teaching that you don't get out of practicing law?

There's an enrichment that comes from sharing with an audience who wants to absorb. I don't care what you do for a living, if you've done it for 36 years, you're going to learn something. I'll let other people say whether I'm a good lawyer or not, that's not for me to say, but I have learned something in the 150 trials that I've had. There are young lawyers out there, young people who want to be lawyers out there, who, whether it's true or not, whether they're right or they're wrong, they think I know something. They are grateful to hear it and they challenge me. It's that challenge that makes me rethink and rethink positions that I hold to be true. And frankly, as society changes, I think you need to stay in touch with younger people, although not everybody is younger — I've had 65-year-old students, but most of the people who are in law school are younger than 40. The further I get from being 40 years old, the further I get from the culture or that component of society that they live in every day. I suppose I can get some of it from television and some from reading, but there's nothing like interaction. And so I am challenged by my students.

I have a lottery course; I only take 12 students. It's great that I see 25 people, 30 people fighting for these positions. It makes me feel good, and it makes me absolutely work hard to make it worth their while to be there. Because I'm working hard, I'm getting better as a lawyer.

The Boyd School has a new dean, John V. White. What do you hope he accomplishes over the next three to five years?

I'm not one who thinks that UNLV and the Boyd Law School ought to be the Harvard of the West. I think that it's the job of UNLV and the law school to serve our community. I don't think we needed UNLV and the Boyd School to serve the country or to serve the world. But I think we definitely needed it to serve our community.

I can tell you from having firsthand contact with the students that there are many of them who have it in mind that that's what they want to do. So it would be my hope, and it is my understanding that our new dean will take our school and kick it up a notch in terms of the kind of community service that flows from it. It would be my hope that UNLV will go from not just having students serve the community, but to have them continue to do that with that kind of dedication that young students have after they become lawyers and well into their careers.

What do law students need to learn in order to succeed as lawyers?

The first thing they should do after they graduate law school and pass the bar is forget everything that they were told in law school.

Here's the problem with legal education: Legal education is geared toward teaching people how to think. It's excellent at that. The problem is that while it's teaching them how to think, it's making them forget how to feel. In my trial ad class I tell my students that if they want to learn how to try to case, they should start their training by getting a job as a door-to-door salesman because what it's all about is communication and persuasion. Neither of those two things are taught to you in law school. In law school you are taught to focus, to study, to find distinctions where none exist. And these are all important, they are all part of the legal process. I don't mean to be demeaning this, but to answer the question as you put it, whether you are working for the government, whether you're working for an institution, whether you're working in the private practice of the law, whether you're involved with the judiciary, it's a people business. It's about people, it's about victims, it's about the accused, it's about consumers, it's about producers, it's about megacorporations, it's about the ma and pa store, it's about people. If you want to excel at it, what you really need to do is keep your lawyer skills but develop your people skills. Unfortunately the pressures of a legal education, getting through law school and passing the bar really ring people skills out of law students. So what they really need to do is convert yourself into a people-skills sponge, re-absorb it all and let it go. That's the advice I have for them.

You have also dealt with many First Amendment cases. What are the most common types of First Amendment cases you have seen recently?

In my own practice, there seems to be an awful lot of people who seem to feel the media has gotten out of control, and there seem to be a lot of problems with the public's perception of the media's credibility. That is not my perception, but I'm more of an insider.

I think what we need, and what I'm seeing start up again, is a more aggressive media stance on seeing to it that the public is made aware of information that government has fought very hard over the last 10, 15 years — particularly over the last eight years — to conceal.

What we're seeing right now is an attack, and a timely one — it isn't too late, it's too bad it wasn't sooner, on information being sealed by judges, information that the public doesn't have access to and it being done without any apparent set of rules in terms of when it can be done or when it should be done, no checks and balances.

Another area I am doing work in right now is defamation. I don't think the time will ever come when the First Amendment will erode the way other amendments have, such as the Fourth Amendment, the protections of privacy, but it's one we have to be vigilant to protect.

Another area I've had to visit far too many times over the years is the question of the privilege of the reporter to not disclose the reporter's source. That is, in my opinion, the No. 1 need we have right now to see to it that Washington creates a statutory privilege that protects news gatherers so they don't have to disclose the source who gave them information that may have blown open something that was a secretive process going on that the public had no knowledge about.

If this is a democracy, then it needs to have the sun shine on it. As much as they are subject to criticism, and as much as some of that criticism is justified, you're not going to see people in government reveal things directly. They're going to reveal them to a reporter and it's going to be the reporter's job, as it always has been, to get that word out as to what's going on in government that might be suspicious or corrupt.

That's not going to happen — that person in government, that person with the information, is not going to give it to a reporter or to a news gatherer or to anybody if they think that person is going to be put in jail until they give up their source.

Now we've seen that happen three times in the last two years. It's happened more than that, but it's reached visibility three times in the last two years. The time has come when we really, really need — even those people who are out there criticizing the press, the reason that they're criticizing the press is because they're reading it and not agreeing with it. And so if you ask them if they'd rather not read it at all, I think their answer would be no, they want to read it. Well, if you want to read it, then you need to support that kind of privilege and that type of protection for the news gatherer, then let the reader, let the public, make up their own mind what they believe and what they don't believe. But the only way to do that is by having enough information so that you can weigh it all.

I think they will still get the information, I think that there is a degree of integrity in the kind of news gatherer who is willing to take that chance and take that risk, we've seen it. The problem is, I don't think there are enough news gatherers who are going to be willing to take that risk, so there will be fewer that get the information, which will result in less information in the public news.

You have been involved in the ongoing ethics debates in your profession. What are the most pressing issues there, both for Nevada and Nationally?

Disclosure.

Disclosure, disclosure, disclosure. It's all about disclosure.

I don't think there's much doubt that some of our public officials — you have to wonder why somebody would take a $54,000 a year job. And when they're finished with the job, they're living in a $2 million house.

There are many things that a public official can do for personal gain. Many things. And almost all of them are lawful so long as the appropriate disclosures are made. And so I think ultimately if you take a look at most of the ethics issues that have arisen in Southern Nevada but also nationally in Washington (D.C.) they kind of all reduce to that single word: disclosure, or failure to disclose. Or worse yet, lie. An opportunity to disclose and a denial.

We expect a lot from our elected officials. Those expectations in the last 200 plus years have almost never been lived up to. I think we recognize that there is a little shenanegan and chicanery going on in just about every office in any public official's life and I think that we as a society are willing to, if not condone, then at least accept, tolerate some level of it. At least behaviorally that's true. I think that culture may be changing. I think that the federal government has done a good job in some of its investigations in recent years. I have defended against those and you know that.

I think that some of the theories that the government has come up with have been inaccurate. I think some of the witnesses that the government has come up with have been almost prostitutes and have all the credibility of a prostitute with some of the things they have said to the government. But the effort that the government has made is what I admire and what I respect. And the effort needs to be made and it's going to get that from time to time somebody is going to be wrongfully convicted. But that doesn't mean that the effort should be abandoned. You leave it through the courts and the process of the courts and the jurors of those courts to make those decisions. The day comes where we give up our jury system we better change the name of our country, that's for sure. Because it's at the very heart of the country. You want to talk about a government by the people? The government by the people takes place in court with a jury sitting. theres no doubt about that. Anything beyond that is fictitious. Anything beyond that is a representative form of government. The most direct form of government is the jury trial.

I don't think ethics can be imposed. I think ethics comes from having a sense of right and wrong. I think it's the electorate's responsibility to get the sense of the person they are electing to see if that person impresses them with having a sense of right and wrong. If that person has a sense of right and wrong but may not be as talented as their opponent who doesn't have that sense, then you've got a choice to make.

That's what special interests are all about. People will elect people who will vote the way that they want them to vote, or think they will vote the way they want them to vote. Whether they're trustworthy people or not, as long as they think they will vote the way they want them to vote. That's something that may have to change before we can get any higher degree of ethics in our elected officials.