Call to law late in life starts in childhood with Lucille
Here’s a riddle for you: Why would a guy with a lifetime of success in three careers who’s the owner of a thriving digital marketing firm go to law school well into his AARP years?
The answer was a long time in coming, starting with Lucille. Long before I’d ever heard of an eloquent, young black preacher from Atlanta who would become the face of the civil rights movement, Lucille would appear at our family’s back door each morning in South Carolina as my father left for his job as dean of a local college. Lucille became our mother for the day. If any of the three King children needed help, from assistance buttoning a shirt to bandaging a skinned knee to reaching for a glass on an upper kitchen shelf, we cried out for Lucille, who was always instantly there to help.
The best-selling novel and 2011 movie “The Help” unflinchingly depicted the apartheid South before the Civil Rights Movement, when middle- and upper-class white families hired African American women as house servants for exploitative wages. For me, the film was a replay of my childhood in the early 1960s and of Lucille, an impoverished descendant of slaves and wife of a tenant farmer. My earliest memories include standing up in the back seat of the family station wagon as my father drove Lucille home every evening, down unpaved roads and past wooden shanties that were home to our mill town’s black residents.
Lucille’s employment with my family ended when I was nine years old, and my father took a university position 60 miles away. There, my family joined a local Presbyterian church, and my dad became a church deacon.
Passion for law meets passion for law marketing
Vanguard CEO’s call to law later led him to expand from 30 years of medical practice marketing to incorporate legal marketing services into the business – with a growth guarantee of 15%-30% for client firms.
Civil Rights Movement comes to our all-white church
Shortly after the passage of Civil Rights Act of 1964, African American activists began testing new freedoms by appearing at the doors of all-white churches throughout the South, asking to be seated for services. The deacons of our little church in the countryside called an emergency meeting. Each deacon was asked how he would react as a Sunday greeter. When my father’s turn came, he said simply, “I’d find seats for them.”
It wasn’t long after that meeting that my father took an anonymous phone call at home. A male voice on the other end said that if my dad said anything like that again, our house would be burned to the ground.
Flash forward many decades. One evening I’m listening to an interview on the car radio with the venerated Bryan Stephenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative and a civil rights attorney. I hear Mr. Stephenson relating how his organization has freed thousands of wrongly convicted felons, including accused murderers on death row, and represented thousands more denied competent legal representation and fair trials. You may have heard of him from “Just Mercy,” the book and 2020 film of the same name.
Listening to Bryan Stephenson inspired my desire
As I listened to his radio interview, my instant and strong response was, “If I had to do it over again, THAT’s the kind of work I’d do!” Tragically, the opportunity began forming just a few years later. In 2013, my wife and life partner of 19 years died suddenly of a rare and deadly form of stroke. She left me a little insurance money. I invested it in the stock market.
A few years later I had enough to pay law school tuition. I took the LSAT and began law school part time. I now have a juris doctor diploma, the fourth of my academic degrees.
All around me, fellow baby boomers are gleefully packing up office belongings and venturing off into comfortable retirements of golf, travel, and visits with grandchildren. Why, I constantly ask myself, do I feel called in a very different direction?
Another push to law from “The Second Mountain”
The answer is perhaps best expressed by New York Times columnist David Brooks, in his book, “The Second Mountain,” in which he writes of successful professionals who leave a comfortable career in which they’ve each climbed a “first mountain,” for something potentially more rewarding.
They realize: this wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered.
I am the great-great grandson of a Georgia plantation owner, who was master of more than 400 slaves. I was born white, male, and heterosexual to educated middle-class parents. I have had nearly every imaginable advantage in life. And so I’ve begun scaling my second mountain.
Transition to public-interest law
My ascent will be a transition ultimately to the practice of public-interest law. In the meantime, a synchronicity of missions has arisen. With greater exposure to the practice of law has come an awareness of the vital importance of connecting the right client to the right attorney when that client is most in need of help.
Coincidentally, that’s exactly what my company has done with doctors and patients for a quarter-century, through something called content marketing. It’s called marketing but it’s really about using the internet and search engines to advance public education and give people with big problems the basic knowledge they need to make the best choices of professional problem solvers.
What a wonderful place in life I’ve been led to. I have so many to thank: Lucille, Bryan, my late wife Leslie, my courageous father, and dozens more. I am overflowing with gratitude for this extraordinary opportunity to pay it forward. Thank you.