In one word: Justice.
I was born with an inherent empathy for the underdog, for the underserved, for what Jesus calls “the least of these.” I hate to see people taken advantage of. It grates on me. Conjures up my grit. I seek justice.
For instance, though I engage in a plaintiff’s practice focusing on personal injury compensation, I receive my greatest satisfaction from assisting folks to experience justice through claims that do not yield attorney fees. Recently, a plumber friend of mine approached me about extensive work he had done, only to receive a bogus check for same. Every effort to encourage his customer to pay for his services was rebuffed. Through my letter to the customer and a follow-up phone call, his customer paid the plumber in full. Though only a simple pro bono matter, I felt greatly privileged and was overjoyed through his gratitude and his wife’s statement afterwards, “I wish I had gone to law school so I could help people like that also.”
I can think of no other vocation that more powerfully addresses societal ills than the legal profession. Consider “To Kill a Mockingbird,” wherein Atticus Finch takes on Deep South racism in the 1930s. His is a loss, but in losing he edges forward in reverse Pyrrhic fashion a powerful statement for equity. Consider “Erin Brockovich” who, though not a lawyer, works as a paralegal with her firm to expose and then cause an electric power company to compensate its victims through a class action suit for causing illness and death through ground water pollution. Then there’s the “Dark Waters” movie about attorney Robert Bilott’s vigilant fifteen-year class action pursuit against DuPont Chemical Company knowingly and secretly poisoning soil and water in West Virginia through its PFOA (Teflon) waste disposal, wreaking health havoc on Parkersburg’s residents. Check out Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, which fights for release of wrongfully convicted prisoners who serve time, life sentences for many, when everybody else has long forgotten them. The list goes on in America’s pursuit of its pledge to advance liberty and justice for all.
And none of that that would be possible in a country governed by the rule of law without the able assistance of attorneys dedicated to making it happen. Like we as members of the Knoxville Bar Association do.
In 1872, the US Supreme Court determined in “Bradwell v. Illinois” that the practice of law is a privilege and not a mere right. As early as the 16th Century AD, law was deemed as one of the three esteemed learned professions, along with theology and medicine. I am greatly humbled to be a member of an honorable, learned profession that further inspires me to properly represent our esteemed vocation in word and conduct. I endeavor to pursue excellence with humility in accordance with the Mission Statement I fashioned on the first day I opened my practice in May 2000: “To honor Christ by providing a safe haven for justice and service through the practice of law,” which is underscored by Biblical Amos’s “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (5:24). That statement is framed and displayed in every office of our law practice as a reminder that, no matter what, we will not deviate from its guiding light.
Trial law in particular is inherently adversarial. (I’ll always remember a statement a professor made my first day at UT Law School: “In the practice of law there are always at least two sides to every story, which is why we have lawsuits.”) Though adversarial, the practice of trial law is one of the few remaining civil means by which disputes can be resolved in an increasingly polarized society through Hegel’s dialectical process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, with a judge or jury deciphering through application of law and fact a copacetic resolution. I am privileged to participate in a profession that helps maintain order in what otherwise would be a chaotic vortex.
Robert Frost concludes his “Birches” poem with these words: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” We attorneys, in particular members of the collegial Knoxville Bar Association, could do worse than be practitioners of the law.
