Professional Memberships

• Certified Civil Trial Specialist, Tennessee Commission of Continuing Legal Education and the National College of Advocacy
• Association of Trial Lawyers of America
• Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association (Board of Governors, 1993-2001)
• National College of Trial Advocacy

Education

• Memphis State University Law School (J.D., 1978)
• University of Tennessee at Knoxville (B.S., With Honors, 1975)
• Jackson State Community College

Personal

• First Baptist Church, Millington, Tennessee (Teacher of 3rd Grade Sunday School, 1993-2000)
• As a youth basketball coach for seven years, coached the First Baptist Church team to the 10-and-under league championship in the City of Memphis basketball tournament
• Soccer coach for 12 years in the Millington youth leagues
• Born in Shelby County, Tennessee, December 6, 1953

Why I Became a Lawyer

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My father was a smart man. He only went to the second grade but he knew more than a lot of folks — doctors, lawyers, professors, etc. He was a sharecropper from Mississippi who later became a successful business man in the furniture business. He always said, though, that in his lifetime the small retail business person would be put out of business by the large chain. He was right.

At an early age, it seemed like all I ever saw was the "little guy" getting squeezed out by the big guy, whether it was the small retail business person or the blue-collar worker or the widows and children. I saw how my mother was treated by the legal system when, following my father's death in a tragic and unexpected plane crash, she was handed the responsibility  of raising a 14-year-old. She was a teacher with no job, no business experience and had never driven a car. Other than by her attorney, Mr. C.A. Davis, she was handled in a rude, condescending manner by all of the folks she came in contact with in the legal system.

The lawsuit that she and others filed against those that they felt responsible for the deaths of my father and others was lost — thrown out by the judge — in favor of the government.

I am a trial lawyer, and I am very proud to be. There has always been a Goliath in this country, but as long as the people had the right to legal representation and a jury to decide their fate (something which the brilliant leaders who drafted our Constitution knew many years ago), then we all have a chance. Those chances are dwindling, and time is running out.

Don't be misled by "tort reform," "runaway juries," "greedy lawyers" and the like. These are nothing more than a smokescreen to put pressure on legislatures to take away the rights of the individual at the hands of the almighty corporation. Because there is only one thing that scares the almighty corporation: that is you, a jury. When the corporations are allowed to use their power and influence to set money damages at $250,000, which is what they want and are pushing for now, they will have managed to strip away the time-honored fundamental right of U.S. citizens.

Maybe if I hadn't been born in the circumstances I was born in, I would feel a little differently. Perhaps, if my father was the President of the United States, and his father was a wealthy New England banker and Congressman; perhaps if I had gone to Yale and Harvard instead of Jackson State Community College, Memphis State and UT, I would be more "enlightened" and see the world through different eyes. I am sort of glad to see the world through the eyes I am looking through now.

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