Six thousand, six hundred and twenty days
(And yes, that includes weekends and holidays and vacations and leap years…)
The painting above was created by a dear friend’s brother for my birthday.
‘Lawyers, I suppose, were children once…'
Inscription upon the statue of a child in the Inner Temple Garden in London
(Credit to Jane Gardam’s magnificent lawyer trilogy beginning with its first book, ‘Old Filth’)
A few weeks ago, on Thursday, May 13th, 2021, we settled a case in mediation that I had originated. Sam did most of the heavy lifting while I provided the zoomed ‘gravitas’ and elements of the unknown and pithy and cogent and often funny commentary and observation. This is something I have done, over and over again, for as long as I can remember. I’ve always been headed to the courtroom, been in the courtroom or preparing to go into the courtroom.
Why would this date, May 13th, 2012 be of special significance to me? It was the conclusion of my last case. There are no more and there will be no more.
After forty-five and one half years, almost to the day, I have closed my formal legal career as a litigator, as a courtroom lawyer.
I will not turn in my license, resign my various memberships, ignore my honors and awards. I enjoy bar cocktail parties and visiting with colleagues. I’ll help others evaluate cases. I’ll keep up with the law, the cases. I’ll keep my head in. I just am not going into the courtroom any longer. I have long ago earned my spurs and my damn good reputation and I now get to walk off the stage with my head up and my brain and skills still knife sharp.
It’s just time.
It is a feeling, a sensation that for me calls for retrograde examination and some thoughtful consideration.
What a ride it has been! It has all gone by so quickly. I have enjoyed it all so much.
There were far more ‘ups’ than ‘downs’. I have been greatly blessed with success. Oh I taken my hits and losses along the way but the victories, big endings and triumphs far outweigh the ones where things did not ‘turn out’.
I already know that I’ll never turn my lawyer brain off, that is until I’m drooling on myself, sitting in my porta-potty chair with my lap robe on and my ear horn at hand.
I was, as were we all, taught to ‘think’ like lawyers. It took a while for that very important light bulb to come on but once it did, it became as natural to me as my skin.
It will never leave me. It may fade but it will never leave me.
I know how to break a case down into the sum of all its parts. I know how to do the algorithms, the necessary analysis, its elements, its twists and turns, its twitches and variables.
It is the equivalent of playing chess on six levels, often when the boards are shaking and tilting and listing.
And you have to see the past and present and future, often all at the same time.
You have to be able to speak convincingly and with clarity and engagement. The same is true of your writings.
It is mandatory that you have a sense of humor, sometimes self-effacing and that you too are able carry a sense of smoldering, controlled anger, even outrage.
You have to realize what your body and movements and voice look and sound like as you work.
You have to carry yourself well and with presence.
I was taught by so many people so many of these things and more,all so long ago and they are all permanently embedded in my mind’s Rolodex.
Here is the basic lodestone of what I did. It comes from my original and beloved dear friend and law partner, Terry Crumpler.
An acronym…TAYC…it was original from him…Thinking About Your Case…When I first heard it, I immediately stole it for my use too.
(And of course, we trial lawyers are predatory. We beg, borrow and steal from anything and anyone, all in the name of getting better. And if we are legitimate, we are ethical about it too.)
It is so true. It’s what we do if we are to become and stay as the ‘Real Deal’.
We think about your case at breakfast, in the shower, while driving, while taking a walk, while taking a drink, while we visit with friends. We waken from sleep and make notes in the dark. We think about your case all the time.
So, how did this all happen to me?
There were no indications early on or even within my journey into young adulthood.
But now that I look back, the path glows brightly behind me.
Things happened, oh my goodness, did they ever happen!
I was terrible with math and science and foreign language. I was very good with English and reading and history. I could see it. I could see them. When I turned those pages, the stories and the characters became totally real to me.
When I was eleven, my father, knowing that it was time to step my mind up, asked me to lay down my Hardy Boys and Landmark books and handed me two ‘grown up’ books- Cornelius Ryan’s THE LONGEST DAY (he knew I was into war and heroes) and once I had devoured that, Richard McKenna’s THE SAND PEBBLES. Game, Set, Match. I was hooked.
Also, when I was eleven, I got a heavy duty construction job, hauling brick and digging ditches and learning to use tamps and jackhammers. I made 60 cents an hour. Minimum wage back then was $1.10. I didn’t care. I worked on a five man crew of huge, funny and profane black guys. I learned to chew tobacco, cuss, talk about girls in the most salacious ways; it was another form of substantive education.
I went from being a soft, flinching fatso to a bad ass football player. I loved playing it all, all sports, all the time. I learned about toughness, competition and laying your guts out on the line. I became a young warrior.
I went to a wonderful, all boys boarding school, The Choate School, up in Connecticut. For four years, I was exposed to fellows from all over the country and learned to get along with all sorts of people from all over the country and from all over the world. People skills evolved. I learned to lead and to follow. I learned to get along.
The first course I took at Choate as a Third Former (9th grade) was mandatory. It was The Great Speakers and Speeches, taught by a banty rooster, barrel chested, painfully precise Englishman, Master Ralph Symonds. We learned to recite, to speak clearly. He broke us of all the hesitation and filler. ‘Ums’ and ‘Wells’ and ‘You Knows’ and ‘Like’ were banished.
It was an academically rigorous place. In essence, I went to a four year college before I went to a four year college. We read and read some more. We roundtabled, we debated. We were driven to be curious. I loved it.
I moved on to my beloved Chapel Hill, eschewing chances at Yale and Penn. I knew I had what it takes, whatever that might turn out to be.
I joined a fine fraternity, the Beta Chapter of Delta Kappa Epsilon. There was plenty of brainpower there. We were known as the Prep School House. Fine by me. Lots of good guys and lots of fine minds. Not only did we do a fine and constant imitation of Animal House, we studied (some). I was a Political Science major with minors in English and History. Perfect lawyer stuff. Little did I know. My freshman year I had a 3.2 GPA. My junior year, a 4.0, my senior year, a 3.75. My sophomore year I majored in beer and bad behavior and racked up a .70. My Daddy took away my car, my one credit card and my paltry ‘go to college’ checkbook. I learned to hitchhike, wait tables and scrounge around with plenty of grubby odd jobs to make a few extra bucks so I could buy whisky with a fake I.D. and take a date the movies.
I graduated in 1972 and grudgingly went home to Winston-Salem. I got an apartment and cadged an afternoon job at my old day school, running elementary and middle school sports programs and then later in the day, helping coach a pretty damn good junior high school football team. We won our conference private school championship. I thought I was headed to becoming a high school football coach.
(Fun factoid: I am the only graduate of Summit School to have played on a conference championship team and to have helped coach one as well. I hope my family will put that in my obituary when the time comes.)
My Daddy sat me down and pointedly said I needed to go to graduate school. I needed seasoning. Maturing. At least three more years of growing up. Coaching football could come later. I got into Wake Forest Law and wandered in at mid-year. I was lost.
(It did not help that I had gotten married that summer. What the Hell…everyone was doing it…I was very distracted.)
I was a bored and desultory law student. My grades were awful. A wonderful, old timey professor, Dr. Robert E. Lee pulled me into his office and quietly, almost in a whisper, said he was disappointed in me, told me I had the tools to become a fine lawyer, that he had faith in me and that I needed to get down to the hard work of ‘pulling down the books’. He told me, told all of us, the Law Is A Jealous Mistress and we were already in her embrace and that we needed to learn to love her.
I mentally winked at that part. But he was right. Challenged, I got down to work and slowly began to turn my academic scow around.
My last semester, I made two A’s and four B’s. All that brought my class rank up to 123 out of 128. I had avoided riding the anchor. I was delighted.
I graduated in two and a half years in the Spring of 1975. Still, I had no intention of taking the North Carolina State Bar. A squadron of my law school friends told me that that was a no-go, that I had made it this far and that I was going to study for and take the Bar exam. And so I did.
During studying for the Bar, my good buddy, the aforementioned Terry Crumpler and his then gal pal and my then wife and I went out to dinner. It was a Friday night and we had two evenings off before resuming our frightening drudgery. Terry and I got dog drunk, lit up like crazy fools and in a fit of ‘We ride At Dawn!’) decided and declared that if I passed the bar exam (we all knew he was going to pass), we would throw in together and open our own firm in Winston-Salem
Remarkably, I did pass the bar and we opened a little office, Glenn and Crumpler at Suite 610 of NCNB Building, across the street from the Forsyth County Hall of Justice. We were sworn in in the mid-autumn of 1975.
Our first cases were Terry being court-appointed to represent a jailed shoplifter, mine the title search of a poor neighborhood rent house (this courtesy of my Mother’s hectoring my real estate mogul Uncle).
I went to the Deed Vault and realized I hated it. Terry went to the jail and hated it every bit as much. We instantly switched files. He’s still one of the great real estate and transactional lawyers in the Southeast. I found the jail and then the courthouse. Our professional fates were sealed.
About ten years later, I met a great tort lawyer named Kendall Few from Greenville, South Carolina at a seminar in Washington, D.C. and soon thereafter, brought him a case against the ‘great’ James Dickey, author of Deliverance and Doubleday Publishing. Kendall liked the case, we began to work on it and soon thereafter, he asked me to join up with him. So I came down to the Palmetto State, passed the bar and began to hone my skills as a big-boy medical malpractice and tort lawyer under his watchful and helpful eye.
About thirty years ago, I found my great mentor, the incomparable Kermit King of Columbia. We have tried many cases together, with some failure and much more success. I’ve never run into anyone like him. An amazing lawyer, a better person, a dear, dear friend. At ninety, he’s still teaching me.
And too, so many wonderful and interesting folks along the way, regrettably too many to mention. But I recall and think of them all, from time to time, with great awareness and affection. Judges, lawyers, witnesses, court administrators, clerks, law enforcement, court reporters and more-they were all so patient with me as I stumbled and staggered forward.
And yes, there were some stinkers and SOBs but not too many and they were never able to be any turds in my punchbowl, though I expect for a few, I served that purpose aggravatingly well for them. So it goes…
And I will always stand for the Jury System, The Constitution and The Law.
Fast forward all those days and weeks and months and years. And now, for me, it’s over.
I was asked the other day, “Will you miss it? Do you miss it?”
My response was simple and comfortable.
“I will happily remember and love it all.”
And now, I’m just at the airport in my mind, changing planes. I was an attorney and always will be. Now my profession, my work is being a writer, an author. God knows I have an enormous storehouse to work from.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Court is now adjourned.
For those who might be interested in my fuller biography, it can be found, along with some videos of me speaking to the value of the jury system and other matters legal, here:
And a last word of most grateful thanks to Mark Clore and Sam Allen whom I have been with as ‘Of Counsel’ the last twelve years. Damn fine lawyers and damn fine guys! It is nice to finish it up by their sides.
And a special bow to a few especially wonderful legal assistants along the way, Patty Cherry, Renee Franke, Andrea Glenn and Joann Korleski.
Now I must cease and desist. ;)