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WHAT CAN LAWYERS LEARN ABOUT PROFESSIONALISM from ATTICUS FINCH Atticus Finch and Ethics Special Events Program

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WHAT CAN LAWYERS LEARN ABOUT PROFESSIONALISM from ATTICUS FINCH Atticus Finch and Ethics Special Events Program WHAT CAN LAWYERS LEARN ABOUT PROFESSIONALISM FROM ATTICUS FINCH Atticus Finch and Ethics Special Events Program Talmage Boston Winstead PC 1201 Elm Street, Suite 5400 Dallas, Texas 75270 (214) 745-5400 (Main) (214) 745-5462 (Direct) (214) 745-5390 (Facsimile) [email protected] William M. Parrish DiNovo Price Ellwanger & Hardy LLP 7000 N. MoPac Expressway, Suite 350 Austin, Texas 78731 (512) 539-2628 Direct (512) 539-2627 Fax [email protected] Thursday, June 10, 2010 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. TALMAGE BOSTON Winstead PC 1201 Elm Street, Suite 5400 Dallas, Texas 75270 (214) 745-5400 (Main) (214) 745-5462 (Direct) (214) 745-5390 (Facsimile) [email protected] ______________________________________________________________________________ • Shareholder, Winstead PC in the Dallas office, and commercial litigator in downtown Dallas for over 31 years; • Member, Board of Directors of the State Bar of Texas, serving term from 2008-2011; • Past Chair, State Bar's Litigation Section and Council of Chairs; and Dallas Bar Association's Business Litigation Section; • Recipient, State Bar's Presidential Citation Award each year from 2005-2009; • Named Texas Monthly magazine "Super Lawyer" each year from 2003--2009; • Board Certified (and recertified several times) in both Civil Trial Law (since 1988) and Civil Appellate Law (since 1990) by Texas Board of Legal Specialization; and counsel of record in 21 published opinions in both state and federal courts; • Regular featured columnist, Dallas Business Journal newspaper for the last 5 years; and author of over 60 columns and book reviews for the Dallas Morning News; and • Author of 2 critically-acclaimed books on baseball history, 1939: Baseball’s Tipping Point (Bright Sky Press 2005), foreword by John Grisham; and Baseball and the Baby Boomer (Bright Sky Press 2009), foreword by NPR commentator Frank Deford; inductee as a Media Member into the Texas Baseball Hall of Fame. – for more on that, go to www.talmageboston.com; • BA cum laude, University of Texas at Austin, 1975; and JD, University of Texas Law School, 1978; • Family – wife Claire, and son Scott (age 22) and daughter Lindsey (age 19). Dallas_1\5491340\1 10586-327 3/10/2010 William M. Parrish Partner DiNovo Price Ellwanger & Hardy LLP 7000 N. MoPac Expressway, Suite 350 Austin, Texas 78731 (512) 539-2628 Direct (512) 539-2627 Fax [email protected] Bill Parrish has more than thirty years of experience in intellectual property and other complex commercial litigation. His experience includes jury trials, bench trials and appellate proceedings in both state and federal court, AAA and private arbitrations, and numerous mediations. Although his practice has involved a wide spectrum of commercial cases, the emphasis has been on intellectual property disputes (e.g., trade secret, trademark, trade name, trade dress, patent and copyright disputes), business torts (e.g., unfair competition, deceptive trade practices, tortuous interference with actual and prospective contracts and/or business relationships, fraud, breach of fiduciary duty, unfair advertising practices, etc.), and breach of contract claims. He also has extensive experience in representing companies and individuals in connection with claims brought by various regulatory bodies, including the Attorneys General of over 20 different states, the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Postal Service. In addition to litigating cases, he serves as a mediator. Education University of Texas School of Law . J.D., 1978 . Center for Public Policy Dispute Resolution, Mediator Training, 2004 University of Texas at Austin . B.A., Plan II, with honors, 1975 . Phi Beta Kappa . The University of Texas Outstanding Student, 1974 . Edward S. Guleke Student Excellence Award, 1976 Awards & Recognition . The Best Lawyers in America, Intellectual Property Litigation and Commercial Litigation, 2007- 2010; Bet-the-Company Litigation, 2010 . Texas Super Lawyers, Texas Monthly, Intellectual Property, 2006-2009; Business Litigation, 2006-2008 Professional & Community Involvement . Robert W. Calvert Inn of Court (Executive Committee Member, 2000-2006; President, 2004/2005 term) . American Bar Association (Litigation and Intellectual Property Sections) . State Bar of Texas (Litigation, Intellectual Property and Computer Law Sections) . American Bar Foundation (Fellow) . Texas Bar Foundation (Fellow) . Mobile Loaves & Fishes WHO WAS ATTICUS FINCH AND HOW HAS HE IMPACTED THE PROFESSION? By Talmage Boston Fifty years ago next month, first-time author Harper Lee threw a small, flat, 320-page stone into the ocean of literature and set off a tidal wave that reverberates to this day. On July 11, 1960, Philadelphia-based publisher, J.P. Lippincott, released To Kill a Mockingbird (herein “Mockingbird”) to instant critical acclaim and a place atop the fiction best-seller list, where it would stay 80 weeks. Among other things, Lee’s book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961; became the subject of a successful movie that opened in December 1962, with Atticus Finch played by Gregory Peck in the only Academy Award-winning role of his career; and sold over 30 million copies in over 40 languages, making it history’s seventh all-time best-selling novel. In addition to its commercial success, through Lee’s writing and Peck’s acting, the character Atticus Finch has now pointed many generations toward the goal of becoming lawyers – and not just run–of-the-mill lawyers, but lawyers aspiring to serve the bar with an Atticus Finch level of integrity, professionalism, and courage. Question: Was Atticus Finch purely a creature of Harper Lee’s imagination or was he a real person in her life thinly disguised under a fictional name? Answer: The latter. - 1 - AMASA LEE AS ATTICUS FINCH, HARPER LEE AS SCOUT Shortly after Mockingbird’s publication, Harper Lee acknowledged that Atticus Finch was essentially a favorably fictionalized version of her father, Amasa Coleman Lee (who, like Atticus, had an unusual three-syllable name starting with “A”), husband to Francis Cunningham Finch (meaning Atticus’ last name was the author’s mother’s maiden name). In one of her interviews shortly after the publication of Mockingbird, before she ceased talking to the media in 1965, Ms. Lee said she portrayed Atticus exactly as she thought of her father Amasa: a man “who has genuine humility and a natural dignity. He has absolutely no ego drive, and so he is one of the most beloved men in this part of the state.” Named by Ms. Lee after Cicero’s friend, Titus Pomponius Atticus, who the author deemed “a wise, learned, and humane man,” father Atticus and father Amasa matched up identically in the following respects: •Both were small town lawyers in Alabama who served in the state legislature. •Both had children who called them by their first name, instead of “Dad” or “Papa.” •Both were sole parent mentors to their children, as Atticus’ wife died when his children were young; and Amasa’s wife fell into a mental illness funk that rendered her homebound and speechless when her children were young, totally disconnecting her from the family until her death in 1951. •Both served as counsel for African-American defendants accused of committing felonies against white people in highly-publicized small town trials in Alabama. Despite - 2 - their best efforts, their clients were found guilty by all white juries, resulting in what proved to be death sentences. •Both had the courage as white men to stare down racists’ threats, and thereby stand up for the rights of black people in a segregated society long before the days of Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks, and Brown v. Board of Education. If Amasa Lee became Atticus Finch, then Nelle Harper Lee1 (born in 1926) portrayed herself as Mockingbird’s protagonist, Jean Louise (“Scout”) Finch – a pre-adolescent tomboy in the 1930’s raised by a father without any maternal affection, who learned to read while sitting on her dad’s lap, while inhabiting a small Alabama town where wild dogs sometimes roamed the streets and a belligerent old woman sat on her front porch and screamed at children passing by. Like Scout, the author enjoyed the company of a peculiar summertime male friend (her childhood buddy, Truman Capote, became Mockingbird’s Dill Harris), and was intrigued by a young man on her street mysteriously imprisoned in his own home (Lee’s neighbor, Son Boleware, became Mockingbird’s Boo Radley). Thus, the “fictional” characters who lived in “make believe” Maycomb, Alabama, during the Great Depression became real to Mockingbird’s readers because the book, in fact, was an account of real people who lived in the real town of Monroeville, Alabama, during the Great Depression. Whereas best-selling author Pat Conroy had the characters who inhabited his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina, in his newest novel, South of Broad (Doubleday 2009), say that “somewhere between 19-27% of what a storyteller says is true, and then you start adding things,” Mockingbird more than doubled those percentages. The details of Harper 1 Throughout her life in all social situations, the author has been called by her first name, and used her middle name only when she wrote for publication. - 3 - and Amasa Lee’s lives show that the majority of Mockingbird is essentially true, at least through the author’s eyes, writing a book twenty years after her childhood, that described what she had seen, felt, and remembered about the people and events in her small, racially segregated, and economically depressed Alabama hometown. ATTICUS’ DEMONSTRATION OF WHAT TO DO IN AND OUT OF THE COURTROOM The statements and accounts of what Atticus Finch said and did throughout Mockingbird established his Lincolnesque persona in the midst of a volatile, racially torn, small town society, capable of giving only lip service to the concept of equal justice for all. Accused of raping a Caucasian adolescent in 1935, Finch’s African-American client Tom Robinson (thankfully) was not lynched by an angry mob, as he might have been had the alleged crime taken place in the nineteenth century.
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