Special Section Significant sums of hard-earned money, not to mention corporate goodwill and your own personal freedom, often are on the line when companies are taken to court. In fact, the fate of the entire company can be at stake in what corporate defense attorneys call "bet-your-company" cases. Final  Judgment Don't wait until a lawsuit  risks your business to call in  a good corporate defense attorney By Russell Rawlings

Learn more: N.C.'s best business lawyers NCADA celebrates 26 years of service

More than likely, your business already has solid relationships with an insurance broker, a computer vendor, a banker, a CPA firm, a printer, even plumbers and car mechanics. But in today’s complex society you need one more number handy in your Rolodex – a good defense attorney. In an age when people sue McDonalds for making them fat, having an established relationship with a defense attorney who knows business law could keep you in business.

From giant corporations to small businesses and all points in between, legal liability is serious business. Significant sums of hard-earned money, not to mention corporate goodwill and your own personal freedom, often are on the line when companies are taken to court.

In fact, the fate of the entire company can be at stake.

“That’s what we call ‘bet-your-company’ cases,” says Tom Schroeder, an attorney in the Winston-Salem office of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice. Schroeder is a member of the North Carolina Association of Defense Attorneys, a Cary-based organization that provides educational and networking support for some 700-plus civil defense attorneys across the state.

“Bet-your-company litigations are those high-stakes cases that every company has to worry about in some form,” Schroeder says. “One of my clients, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., faces this on a very frequent basis, but I think what happens in tobacco cases is something the business community ought to keep an eye on, because what the cases are really about is personal choice and responsibility, and those are issues that are important to every major business.”

Legal issues are critical to the tobacco industry, according to Dan Donahue, RJR senior vice president and a 15-year member of the NCADA. But as Donahue talks about his industry’s response to legal attacks, you may want to insert the name of your industry to see how you should respond to your individual situation.

“We in the tobacco industry produce a mature consumer product — by that I mean one which has evolved over time and changes relatively little from year to year,” Donahue says. “There are, of course, different brands and brand styles, but the issues in the cases brought against us are the same, no matter what the brand or brand style.

“Over the past nearly 50 years, however, our company has invested significant amounts of time and money into developing a product that responds to the health risks of smoking and into making the highest quality product we can for our consumers. It is critical for us to have counsel who can both understand the long history of our research and development activities, and who can clearly and convincingly describe those efforts to a jury.

“Clearly, cigarettes are a product that carry great risk with respect to their use. There are only two entities that can decide whether citizens of the state of North Carolina or any state have the right to buy and use cigarettes — the federal government and the state government. Once these entities make the decision that cigarettes are a lawful product, then we do the very best we can to provide our customers with the best and highest-quality product.

“It is important to us and valuable to us to have lawyers who understand that background and understand the role of the manufacturing company.”

The defense attorneys’ ability to understand that role and, in turn, communicate it to the juries across the country, has enabled RJR and other major tobacco companies to successfully defend millions of dollars in individual claims and billions of dollars in class-action lawsuits.

Left: The strong relationship between RJR Senior Vice President Dan Donahue and Tom Schroeder of Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice has helped the Winston-Salem tobacco company successfully defend millions of dollars in the courtroom.

Donahue cites a recent case in northern California. “After several weeks of presentation, the jury ruled with us and Philip Morris. What that showed us is that people in northern California have common sense and listen to facts. The critical role of the lawyer is to understand the law so that they can explain this to the jury and displace the rather simplistic notion that some would like to plant in the minds of jurors that tobacco companies are responsible for all of the tobacco-related illness in the world.”

In addition to pointing out that the government, through state and federal taxes, makes more money on cigarettes than the manufacturer, the defense attorney must also explain the process through which cigarettes ultimately reach the customer.

“It is important to have a law firm that understands the interrelationship between the government’s role, the manufacturer’s role, the wholesaler’s role, the retailer’s role and the purchaser’s role,” Donahue says. “We sell to the wholesaler, who sells to the retailer, and the retailer sells to the individual.”

“In other words, the manufacturer is two steps removed from the point where someone makes a decision to sell cigarettes to someone who is not of legal age: We would be delighted to lose every cent of what little is paid by minors purchasing cigarettes from retailers.”

Defense attorneys are also vital, Donahue adds, because they have the ability “to wrap their minds around these concepts and articulate them to judges and juries so that they, in turn, can make informed, intelligent decisions that are not based on rumors, passion or prejudice. Our lawyers do a good job of that. We have good, strong defense firms in North Carolina. It is important to have a strong voice in the judiciary.

“In North Carolina, we have a high quality state and federal judiciary — judges of the highest intelligence who apply the facts impartially — but that is not always the case all over the country. It is important to have strong plaintiffs’ attorneys and strong defense attorneys, and (in North Carolina) I think we have good quality on both sides and excellent judges of the highest integrity.”


Getting the Story Straight

The issue of integrity also applies to another key element of the litigation equation — the witness. Defense attorneys devote great attention to the credibility of all witnesses, including those who will be called upon to testify on behalf of the plaintiff. This effort can be crucial to a successful defense outcome, and in some instances may even prevent a suit from ever reaching the courtroom.

Such was the case in Wilmington recently when a hardware store was sued by an individual who claimed he had suffered serious injuries because merchandise in the store had been unsafely placed on the shelf. Doug McIntosh of Crossley McIntosh Prior and Collier served as the defense counsel for the hardware store.

“This was a case involving a plaintiff who claimed that a roll of wire rolled off of a shelf and hit him on the head, causing injuries from head to toe,” McIntosh says. “The injuries seemed inconsistent with a roll of wire falling on his head. Also, he had this independent witness whose story was too good to be true.”

And, of course, it was.

McIntosh, who has devoted much of his 19 years of practicing law to defense work, got to the bottom of the story during the deposition phase. “I was suspicious of the witness and asked to see his driver’s license, mainly to do a criminal records check and possibly impeach his credibility. It turns out that he lived as the same address as the plaintiff. Then he continued to lie even after he knew that I knew his address. When we got to the end, I told him I was going to give him a chance to ’fess up; I told him it was like talking to my 5-year-old son when I asked him if he was sure there wasn’t something else he wanted to add. At that point he changed all of his testimony.”

McIntosh, who may well have saved his client more than $100,000 in this case, added that dishonest witnesses are not nearly as unusual as witnesses who admit that they lied, thereby leading to dismissal of the case. “I always look for mannerisms,” McIntosh says. “In this case, his testimony was incredible. He basically was establishing all of the elements of a premises liability case, saying that the merchandise was askew and hanging from the edge — something an independent witness would not notice in that detail.

“Those are the kinds of things we look for. People exaggerate and puff up their stories all of the time, but outright perjury is rarely admitted to as it was in this case.”

That’s because more often than not witnesses are telling the truth, and doing so in a manner that is consistent with their recollection of the events in question. And quite often the plaintiffs have indeed suffered some degree of damage. Even the plaintiff in Wilmington who talked his roommate into lying for him had been injured — it just wasn’t the fault of the hardware store.

These types of cases, therefore, typically boil down to a question of liability. This is as true for the Charlotte attorney representing Lowe’s Motor Speedway as it is for the Rocky Mount attorney representing a local property owner.

David Allen of the Parker Poe firm in Charlotte is the former. He has represented Speedway Motorsports Inc. for nearly 20 years, and the parent company of the former Charlotte Motor Speedway has employed his firm for some four decades. Roger Askew of the Rocky Mount firm of Baker Jenkins & Jones is the latter. He recently defended the owner of a rental property in a lead poisoning case that also hinged, in part, on the question of liability.

Allen is the person who Lauri Wilks, general counsel for the speedway, turned to when the pedestrian bridge at the speedway collapsed on a Saturday night in May 2000 at the conclusion of the popular NASCAR all-star race, the Winston Select. “We were involved in the case immediately,” Allen says. “By Sunday we had hired experts to figure out what had happened. There was also the question of preserving the evidence. Obviously the speedway has a good relationship with the (Department of Transportation), which was very cooperative in handling those issues.”

One hundred and seven people were on the bridge when it collapsed, resulting in 73 actions, some of which are consortium claims involving multiple plaintiffs. As of the end of April, Allen notes, three cases have been tried, 27 have been settled and some 40 cases are remaining. The liability issue has been directed at three parties: the speedway, the company that built the bridge and the company that supplied a chemical additive that the construction company used to harden the concrete in the walkway.

Allen said the speedway readily acknowledged that the accident occurred and people were indeed injured, some seriously. His client has also maintained throughout this ordeal that it was not negligent. “These people were truly innocent,” Allen says of the race fans. “They were at the wrong place at the wrong time; what happened to them could not be avoided. My client feels the same way.”

As for the trial in Rocky Mount, it did not garner the national attention of the Charlotte cases, but it was an unusual case involving a defense attorney who was equally committed to serving the business client.

“This is the first one (of these lead-poisoning cases) we know of that has gone to trial against the rental company and the landlord,” Askew says. The case involved a child who had suffered brain damage, allegedly due to lead poisoning caused by paint that was present in the rental property. In successfully defending a suit that could have resulted in an award in excess of $1 million, Askew challenged and questioned every major point set forth by the attorney for the plaintiff, continuously stressing the issue of burden of proof. “We won on liability and we won on the injury,” Askew says. “The jury came back and said that the injury was not caused by lead.

“What this says is that these cases can be won. We did not roll over. We questioned where the exposure came from; we questioned it and the jury questioned it.”

The latter, Askew notes, is all that he asks of a jury. “You have to get the jury to deal with the facts, not the emotional aspects of the case,” he says. “You have to take the focus away from that. We weren’t trying that issue: The question is who is at fault and, if at fault, what damage did it do? We heard all about the damage that lead could cause, but we had to focus on what did it do, not what could it do.

“When you try a case like this, you always have to get the jury to refocus. You have a thousand little battles going on over the course of a trial, and they can forget about the big picture.”


Never Concede Defeat

Even when the initial result is not as favorable for the defense as it was in the Rocky Mount trial, that does not necessarily mean that the case has been lost, notes longtime defense attorney Richmond G. “Rip” Bernhardt of Greensboro.

Bernhardt recently was involved in a case involving two individuals who had been electrocuted while working on a cotton picker. A suit was filed against the operator of the cotton picker and an insured farmer that resulted in a $2 million award for the plaintiffs against the operator only. In a second suit the trial court ruled that the plaintiffs were entitled “to recover on the policy,” states a trial summary from Bernhardt, who was brought in at that point to appeal on behalf of the N.C. Grange Mutual Insurance Co.

What happened next, Bernhardt says, was unlike anything he had witnessed in his 45 years of practicing law. “The Court of Appeals reversed the summary judgment, and although the insurer had not moved for summary judgment in its favor, the Court (of Appeals) found no coverage for the operator and ordered the case remanded to the trial court for entry of summary judgment in favor of the insurer!”

His client, Bernhardt adds, “was elated. It was a fairly remarkable result. I believe we were able to achieve the result through careful analysis of the policy to determine who was insured, and then we asked that the court look at the evidence. Our argument was that the evidence led to only one conclusion — that the policy did not cover the operator.”

Insurance companies, no doubt, figure prominently in the function of the defense bar, thereby underscoring the universal role that defense attorneys maintain in conjunction with business and industry.

“Our clients are business and industry,” says Clark Smith, the 2002-03 president of the NCADA, who practices law in Lexington with the firm of Brinkley Walser. “Often we may be engaged by an insurance company to represent an individual, but even so, the insurance company is a business.

“The role of the defense lawyer in representing business and industry is to help the jury understand the role of business in society and protect it in spite of what the public perception might be.”

In doing so, Smith adds, defense attorneys rely on the testimony of “good, credible witnesses and experts” in their efforts to “convince juries that the business motivation is reasonable and valid and not based just on greed, as they may think due to general public opinion.

A good defense lawyer has to use good trial skills and good communications skills in order to overcome negative perception.”

Those skills, Smith continues, apply to every aspect of a trial. “There are three elements of a defense case,” he says. “First is the issue of liability. If there is liability, next is the issue of causation; that is, is there a true causal connection between the liability and the alleged damages. Finally there is the issue of damages; are they substantiated in fact?

“We (defense lawyers) defend by first attacking liability. If we have liability issues, however, we don’t give up. We attack causation evidence and damage evidence so as to raise doubts about these in the minds of the jury. If the jury is not convinced on all three elements ‘by the greater weight of the evidence,’ then we have a good chance of a successful defense of our business clients.”




North Carolina's best business lawyers
The business and industry community of North Carolina has benefited enormously through the years from the contributions of hundreds of outstanding lawyers who have devoted their careers primarily to a defense practice. Scattered on the following pages are snapshot views of six of those attorneys, listed alphabetically, all of whom have served the profession for nearly, if not more than, half a century.


H. Grady Barnhill Jr.

Background: Born Aug. 24, 1930, in Buena Vista, Ga., and grew up on a farm in the eastern North Carolina community of Whitakers. Attended Atlantic Christian College (now Barton College) in Wilson for two years before transferring to Wake Forest College. Served in the U.S. Air Force from 1951-55. Returned to Wake Forest and completed law school in 1958.

Family: He and his wife, Carolyn, have four children, three of whom are lawyers or married to lawyers: Mike, who like his father is with Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice; Steve, of the Brinkley Walser firm in Lexington; Carol Barnhill Templeton, assistant clerk of the N.C. Supreme Court; and Scott.

Practice: Clerked for Womble Carlyle in the summer of 1957 and joined the firm after passing the bar exam in September 1958. Became a partner in 1962. Charter member of N.C. Association of Defense Attorneys and inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers in 1977.

Why did you choose a defense practice? “Womble Carlyle was primarily a corporate and defense firm when I began practicing.” According to his company bio, “Grady tried to jury verdict and lost his first case six months after arriving at Womble. Plaintiff’s attorneys had offered to settle the case for $2,500; the verdict was $5,000. Grady appealed. The Supreme Court affirmed. The fee for the trial and the appeal was $500. Out of this smashing defeat came a longtime relationship between Grady and Allstate Insurance Co.” “Aviation played a big role in my practice for a long time,” Barnhill adds in reference to the July 19, 1967, crash of a Piedmont Airlines B-727 and a private aircraft near Hendersonville that left 82 dead. “I spent the next three years in Asheville (representing Piedmont Airlines), and after that I spent time in the aviation industry. I have been involved in defense of corporate litigation, including class actions, derivative actions, SEC cases and the like.”

Who influenced your career? “Irving Carlyle, Pendleton ‘Pen’ Sandridge Sr., Bill and Calder Womble. All four were partners when I joined the firm. I got the job by doing a research project for Leon Rice while I was in law school.”


James D. Blount Jr.

Background: Born Jan. 2, 1927, in Wilson. Completed undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1950 and finished law school at UNC in 1952. Prior to college, he served in the U.S. Navy from 1945-46.

Family: Wife, Linda. He has three children: Joy Haskleck, James III and Charles.

Practice: Went into practice with Thomas Leath — Leath & Blount — in 1952 in Rockingham. Left what had become Leath, Bynum, Blount & Hinson to join Smith Leach Anderson and Dorsett in Raleigh in 1970. Firm is now Smith Anderson Blount Dorsett Mitchell & Jernigan. Charter member of the North Carolina Association of Defense Attorneys and inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers in 1977.

Why did you choose a defense practice? “When I started practicing law in Rockingham ... there was one good defense attorney there but too many times he had conflicts, so he funneled work to me. I developed my trial practice on my own — I didn’t have a mentor — and in Rockingham I did a little bit of everything, including real estate and corporate work. Willis Smith Jr. was still living when I came to Raleigh; he was our senior trial lawyer. I tried a couple of cases with him before he was killed. Eighteen months after I joined the firm I became the senior trial lawyer; in one weekend (in December 1971 when Smith perished in a plane crash) I inherited 144 cases.”

Who influenced your career? “Other than my parents (the late James D. and Dorsey Blount), the greatest influence in my life had to be Leon Brogden, my high school football coach for three years. He instilled in me an absolute knowledge of right and wrong, a complete understanding of what a gentleman ought to do given any set of circumstances, and a sense of very, very fair competition.”


John G. Golding

Background: Born July 24, 1928, in Evanston, Ill. Completed undergraduate degree at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., in 1950 and graduated from the University of North Carolina School of Law in 1953. Served in the U.S. Army JAG Corps from 1953-56.

Family: He and his wife, Virginia, have three daughters, Jeanne Cambo, Teresa Roberts and Kathleen Boyce. None are lawyers but one of their nine grandchildren, Laura Nelson Boyce, aspires to be an attorney following a successful Moot Court experience at South Point High School in Belmont.

Practice: Joined the five-lawyer Charlotte firm of Carpenter & Webb in 1956 and has remained with the same firm — now known as Golding, Holden & Pope — for 47 years. Past president and charter member of the North Carolina Association of Defense Attorneys and a 1989 inductee into the American College of Trial Lawyers.

Why did you choose a defense practice? “I wanted to do trial work. Back then, the trial firms were primarily defense firms and the plaintiffs’ attorneys were mostly solo practitioners, and I needed a steady income because all we brought back from Germany when I got out of the Army was a baby and cuckoo clock. I handled mostly auto litigation at first because compulsory insurance had just come into being, which spiked the growth in auto litigation. And there was virtually no medical malpractice work at that time because back then you had to have expert testimony supporting that the level of care fell below the standard for the community, and the only people who were allowed to testify were the doctors from the community. For the last 10 to 15 years my practice has been devoted primarily to medical malpractice.”

Who influenced your career? “A whole bunch of people; I can’t really single out any one person because I had the opportunity of serving with and practicing against so many fine attorneys.”


W. Harold Mitchell

Background: Born Nov. 8, 1925, in Taylorsville; moved to Morganton when he was 2 and has called Burke County home ever since. His Morganton High School Class of 1943 classmate was the late Judge Sam Ervin III. Served in U.S. Air Force Reserves prior to completing undergraduate and law school requirements at Wake Forest College in 1951.

Family: Married to the former Patricia Melvin on June 10, 1951. They have three children: law partner W. Harold “Marc” Mitchell Jr., Michael and Patricia.

Practice: Licensed to practice law April 3, 1951; allowed to take bar exam prior to law school graduation because of potential call into service during Korean War. Practiced two years in Morganton before opening what is now Mitchell, Blackwell & Mitchell in nearby Valdese. Charter member of the North Carolina Association of Defense Attorneys and inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers in 1982. Has also been involved in corporate practice, taking three local corporations public.

Why did you choose a defense practice? “It chose me. I was serving on the board of the Valdese General Hospital. We had an early malpractice case against the hospital (in the late 1950s) involving a nurse. (The hospital and The St. Paul Fire and Marine Insurance Co.) asked me to defend. I won that case; then they started calling on me to defend cases for them more frequently. As I was successful in representing healthcare defendants, I sort of gravitated to (a defense practice). I never lost a case. Well, I did lose one, but the judgment was less than what I had offered (to settle the case).”

Who influenced your career? “Frank Patton was the biggest influence. He was one of the most outstanding trial attorneys who ever came through North Carolina. He and soon-to-be Sen. Sam Ervin Jr., who was also a great influence, were practicing law in Morganton when I was growing up. I was a soda jerk at Spake Pharmacy, and Frank and Sam frequented the drug store. They set an example that I have tried to follow.”


J. Brian Scott

Background: Born Aug. 11, 1927, in Rocky Mount, and is a lifelong resident. Served in the U.S. Army from 1945 to1947 before proceeding to Wake Forest College, where he fulfilled undergraduate requirements and completed law school in 1951.

Family: Wife, Vena. Four children, including Brian Jr., Barbara and his professional legacy, attorney Morgan Scott Chapman of the N.C. Industrial Commission in Raleigh. His first wife, Betty, and one of their four children are deceased.

Practice: “I took the bar exam on the 7th, 8th and 9th of August 1951, learned I passed on the 11th, got married on the 15th and went to work on the 27th,” joining what is now Battle Winslow Scott & Wiley in Rocky Mount. Charter member of the North Carolina Association of Defense Attorneys and a 1970 inductee of the American College of Trial Lawyers. Has also been a plaintiffs’ attorney and practiced estate law.

Why did you choose a defense practice? “I wanted to be a trial lawyer, and at one time I did it all. Back then, Bill Thorp and I were the dominant lawyers in the area, and as he developed a plaintiffs’ practice, it was only natural that I fell into a defense practice. We must have had hundreds if not thousands of cases together. If lawyers today could practice with the same cordiality that we enjoyed, the world would be better off.”

Who influenced your career? “I’m looking at a picture of the three of them right now. Carroll Weathers was the dean of the Wake Forest law school; he came in my last year. I was the prosecutor for the student council. Our honor system was in a shambles before he came in. We became very close friends. Mr. Kemp Battle was the senior partner in Battle Winslow when I began practicing. He didn’t teach me, he just carried me around with him. Then, after a while, he called me in and said that he needed me to cover the trial argument for him, and told me that he thought I could handle the case. That was his way of letting me know I was ready. And my father, John M. Scott, who was chief dispatcher for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. Many a time when a problem has come up, I’d just look at that picture and say, ‘OK guys, what would you have done?’ ”


Lonnie Williams

Background: Born July 19, 1923, in Wilmington. Served in the U.S. Army after high school, including a year in occupied Korea, before completing undergraduate and law school requirements in five years at Wake Forest College in 1953.

Family: He and his wife, Janice, have three children: Lonnie Jr., with whom he practices law, Gary and Jan Williams Murdoch.

Practice: Served as the first law clerk of the N.C. Supreme Court after law school in 1953-54 before returning to Wilmington. After one year in private practice and three years in practice with Addison Hewlett, joined Poisson Campbell & Marshall, which became Poisson Marshall Barnhill & Williams in 1960. Formed what is now Marshall Williams & Gorham in 1963. Past president and charter member of the North Carolina Association of Defense Attorneys and a 1976 inductee of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

Why did you choose a defense practice? “It has always been my view that you don’t choose what direction your practice takes; you do what happens to come along. When I started working with Addison, there were a flood of claims against the insurance companies because of Hurricane Hazel. He was in the General Assembly, so when he left in the middle of January to go to the legislature, I stayed behind to keep the balls in the air for him. (And) the Poisson firm did a great deal of defense work. When they decided to take me in, there was a door between my office and their firm, so we just opened the door and I started doing defense work.”

Who influenced your career? “Allan Marshall. I came from a poor background, and when I got out of the Army, I milked the G.I. Bill for all it was worth. In the summer I worked to help out, and back then they gave you a lot of citations of cases to work on. I asked Mr. Marshall if I could use his law library in the evenings, and he arranged with the janitor to let me in. He was the all-around best lawyer I ever had the experience of working with. He died in 1979, and we remained close through all those years. If I had a father who had been practicing law he could not have been better to me than that man was.”

Left: The NCADA is headquartered  in the N.C. Bar Center building in Cary

NCADA marks 26 years of serving business clients
Over coffee and sweet rolls some 26 years ago, the North Carolina Association of Defense Attorneys (NCADA) was established. Two Winston-Salem lawyers — William K. Davis of Bell Davis & Pitt and J. Robert Elster of what is now Kilpatrick Stockton — led the effort to formally organize a statewide network of civil trial attorneys and served, respectively, as NCADA’s first presidents.

“At the time the NCADA was founded, I was state chairman for the Defense Research Institute,” says Elster in reference to the national organization for defense attorneys and corporate counsel. “DRI had been pushing for some time for North Carolina to start a defense organization. I enlisted the help of Bill Davis and we called an ad hoc meeting on a Saturday morning at the Albert Pick Motel in Greensboro to discuss.

“About 20 defense attorneys came,” Elster continues. “We took up a collection for coffee and sweet rolls. The NCADA was born.”

From that seemingly humble beginning on June 4, 1977, in which 136 attorneys signed on as charter members, NCADA has grown in numbers as it has expanded the breadth and depth of its stature and scope. As of this June, when Gary Parsons of the Raleigh firm of Bailey & Dixon will be installed as the 26th president, NCADA membership stands at 730 attorneys. Impressive as that is, it is only part of the story behind an organization that counts among its membership many of the most respected legal professionals in North Carolina, including 15 current or former NCADA members who have served as president of the North Carolina Bar Association or the N.C. State Bar.

Involvement at the highest levels of the voluntary NCBA and the mandatory State Bar, not to mention several other legal and professional organizations, is in keeping with NCADA’s desire to position its members and their practices at the forefront of the business community. As key players for NCCBI, local chambers of commerce and countless civic organizations, NCADA members readily recognize the importance of maintaining a strong relationship with corporate leaders and business owners while business leaders, in turn, recognize NCADA members as the best civil defense trial litigators in North Carolina.

NCADA’s sterling reputation begins with its commitment to providing the finest in practice-specific educational opportunities and resources for civil defense practitioners. “NCADA is a professional organization of attorneys who devote a majority of their time to the defense of civil litigation,” notes the organization’s membership recruitment statement. “The NCADA is committed to enhancing the skills, effectiveness and professionalism of defense lawyers; anticipating and addressing issues germane to defense lawyers and the civil justice system.”

The centerpiece of NCADA’s networking initiative is its Annual Meeting, traditionally held in June in conjunction with a stellar continuing legal education (CLE) opportunity through which members can fulfill half of their annual CLE requirements. NCADA will hold its 26th Annual Meeting this June 12-13 at the Wild Dunes Resort & Conference Center in Isle of Palms, S.C. The CLE agenda calls for a two-part program titled “Learn the Law” and “Practice the Law.”

Following closely behind the Annual Meeting in both importance and popularity is the annual Fall Seminar at which NCADA members and insurance claims representatives meet jointly while obtaining continuing education credits in their respective fields. In October, NCADA conducted  a Judicial Candidates Forum to provide an opportunity for candidates for the state’s appellate-level courts to answer questions related to the civil defense practice and the business community. Given the success of the first two forums in 2000 and 2002, this event is likely to continue and grow in prominence as greater interest is placed on the state’s judicial elections.

Communication is central to NCADA’s success, beginning with The Defender. Published three times a year, the organization newsletter features membership information and association news in addition to practice-specific articles and election coverage on the judicial front. In addition to NCADA members, The Defender is mailed statewide to trial judges, law schools and clients of NCADA members. NCADA also maintains a web site (www.ncada.org) with information of interest to both members and nonmembers.

NCADA is headquartered in the N.C. Bar Center in Cary. Association phone numbers are 919-677-0761 or 800-233-2858; fax is 919-677-0761. The mailing address is P.O. Box 4830, Cary, N.C. 27519-4830. The executive director is Lynette Pitt, whose e-mail address is lpitt@ncbar.org.  -- Russell Rawlings

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