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About Me

LITIGATION

I originally went to law school because I wanted to represent plaintiffs in civil rights cases. In 1968 I was a VISTA volunteer in Madison, Alabama, near Huntsville. The town, like so many others in the deep South, had closed a municipal swimming pool because it did not want to integrate it. Although I was a community organizer, and there was ample outrage about the closing, and we could have organized ourselves to get the pool opened, a lawsuit seemed like the best solution. After all, I thought, the Supreme Court had prevented Memphis from keeping its parks segregated, how far from that decision was a federal court ruling that Madison could not close its pool out of racial animus? Ironically, I was already in law school when the Supreme Court issued its decision in Palmer v. Thompson that Jackson, Mississippi could close its swimming pools rather than integrate them.

By then, however, I was determined to find a place somewhere on the front lines of the civil rights legal struggle. My summers in law school had been spent working for the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council, first in Milwaukee with the Welfare Rights Organization and later in Detroit with legal services group litigating welfare issues. In law school I didn't even seriously consider going to work for a major law firm in New York, or Chicago, or Los Angeles. I didn’t even interview. I managed to get a Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowship, and I went to Memphis and Shelby County Community Legal Services. It was my first job; it paid less than half of what New York firms were then paying. I was absolutely thrilled to be able to represent oppressed people who direly needed good representation.

My life in Memphis was changed by a phone call. A woman called to say that her son was in the Tennessee State Penitentiary and that he was supposed to have been released on parole, but that his parole had been summarily revoked. He was going to be locked up for years more. Would we (my colleague Lee Freudberg and I) go to Nashville and visit him and try to get him out? We went. We decided we’d get him out. A lawsuit followed. He got out. I was deeply and profoundly touched. The initial visit, and the dramatic impact it had on me, led me to be a lawyer in a string of civil rights lawsuits in both Tennessee and Mississippi in behalf of confined people.

At the beginning, I didn’t know a lot about the individual, component parts of litigating these cases. Questioning witnesses. Taking depositions. Answering discovery. Selecting jurors. The list of what I didn’t know was enormous. I had no practical skills. It was enough for me that a particular case aimed at alleviating suffering or creating fairness and equality. But there was, of course, a lot more to making that happen than my good intentions. Fortunately, there were experienced lawyers (they all know who they are and have my eternal thanks) who were willing to be my mentors, who answered my questions, who helped me with tactics, who understood strategy, who knew the right way to do things, and who were always willing to help me with whatever I was doing. They recognized from their own experience that completing law school was only a beginning, and that litigation skills were something you had to get afterwards. How did you get them? Some people never got them. Instead of carrying somebody else’s litigation bag to the courthouse, and watching while they did their work, I found myself in the midst of a very intense, on the job training. In essence, I served a wonderful apprenticeship for which I remain eternally grateful.

The delight of general litigation remains that the subject matter and the substantive law constantly change, but the tools and the procedures remain essentially constant. One minute I am learning about how racing car engines work, the next I am learning about land surveying. Then I am learning about horse breeding. The number of possible topics is huge. Every case is completely different.

Unlike some lawyers, I have chosen not to narrow my focus to a particular type of civil litigation or to limit myself by subject matter. I hope for varied cases I will find interesting. I refer cases involving personal injuries, automobile accidents, custody disputes, family court issues, bankruptcy, corporate law, workers compensation, and routine divorces to other lawyers who work almost exclusively in these areas. I do no tax, estate planning, trust or other transaction work. What remains are the nuggets that make general litigation an exciting, enjoyable part of my practice.

If you want to discuss your litigation desires with me, please telephone me at (518) 392-9150 or e-mail.

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