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AWARDSCELEBRATING DISTINGUISHED LEADERS IN LAW

PRESENTING

SILVER

TABLE

When we began planning this celebration of

career achievement, we knew the award title had to be strong enough to carry the weight of an individual’s lengthy contribution to the legal profession and community. Honorees, we knew, would be selected

based on years of continued civic and professional exceptionalism with work that made a significant and positive impact on the profession.

The title selection had to embrace those qualities. And ICON Award said it all.

The 25 Missouri attorneys honored in this inaugural recognition are representative of the incredible outcome that can be achieved through commitment, perseverance and vision.

They are icons.These men and women aspire to a

higher call, leading the way for others. The journey of each is different, but

the destination — while still being written — is measured, thoughtful and remarkable success. They are paragons in the industry who recognize the need to participate and improve their communities, however they define that.

It was a daunting task to select this first group of honorees. History will continue to catalog the achievements of those we honor through this program. But it is their work so far (and the promise of what’s to come) we highlight through this recognition.

They set a high standard of accomplishment.

But, icons tend to do that.On behalf of Missouri Lawyers Media,

I thank them. For what they’ve done. What they do. And what they will do.

Liz IrwinPublisher

Letter Publisherfrom the

real challenges. real answers.SM | polsinelli.comThe choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely upon

advertisements. Polsinelli PC. Polsinelli LLP in California.

Going strong.

In his legal career spanning nearly 50 years, Jim Polsinelli has cultivated countless strong and longstanding relationships with colleagues, clients and community. In fact, our firm’s name stands as a tribute to Jim, out of

respect for everything he has accomplished since founding Polsinelli at the age of 28. As a passionate champion of Kansas City and respected leader within the profession, Jim symbolizes the very definition of an icon.

We proudly congratulate Jim Polsinelli for being honored with the Icon Award by Missouri Lawyers Weekly.

0418.00135 ICON Award MLW - J_Polsinelli_FNL.indd 1 5/10/18 2:30 PM

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Table of Contents

These profiles were reported and written by Missouri Lawyers Media

Senior Reporter Scott Lauck, News Editor Rachel Webb, Opinions Editor

Stephanie Maniscalco, Staff Reporters Nicholas Phillips and Jessica

Shumaker, Digital Editor Allyssa Dudley and Editor Cindi Lash.

Timothy M. Aylward / Horn Aylward & Bandy ..................................................................................... 4

W.H. “Bert” Bates / Lathrop Gage ..................................................................................................... 4

Susan E. Block / Paule Camazine & Blumenthal; former Circuit Judge ......................................................... 5

Kenneth Brostron / Lashly & Baer ..................................................................................................... 6

David V. Capes / Capes Sokol ......................................................................................................... 6

Donald R. Carmody / Carmody MacDonald .................................................................................... 7

John W. Cowden / Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice .................................................................................. 8

Terry B. Crouppen / Brown & Crouppen ............................................................................................ 8

John C. Danforth / Dowd Bennett; former U.S. Senator ........................................................................... 9

James B. Deutsch / Blitz, Bardgett & Deutsch .................................................................................... 10

Dennis E. Egan / Popham Law Firm .................................................................................................. 10

Sandra Farragut-Hemphill / Circuit Judge, St. Louis County ............................................................. 11

Maurice B. Graham / Gray, Ritter & Graham ................................................................................... 12

William P. Grant / Grant, Miller & Smith ............................................................................................. 12

Jon R. Gray / Shook, Hardy & Bacon; former Circuit Judge....................................................................... 13

Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. / Armstrong Teasdale; former U.S. District Judge ............................................. 14

Rebecca T. Magruder / Rebecca T. Magruder MSW JD ..................................................................... 14

James A. Polsinelli / Polsinelli ....................................................................................................... 15

Brendan Ryan / Neutral-Alaris; former Circuit Judge ............................................................................. 16

Howard F. Sachs / Senior U.S. District Judge ................................................................................. 16

John S. Sandberg / Sandberg Phoenix & von Gontard ....................................................................... 17

Mary W. Sheffield / Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals ..................................................................... 17

Charles Weiss / Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner ...................................................................................... 18

Dorothy L. White-Coleman / White Coleman & Associates .............................................................. 18

Michael A. Wolff / Dean Emeritus, Saint Louis University School of Law; former Missouri Supreme Court Judge ..... 19

B4 • Missouri Lawyers Weekly • May 2018

Looking at W.H. “Bert” Bates’ lengthy list of professional and personal affiliations, it might be easier to list the organizations with which he has not

been involved than the ones he has. The Lathrop Gage senior counsel, who formerly was

partner and chair of the firm’s managing partners, has spent much of his life in service to others, personally and professionally.

In addition to his nearly 66-year legal career, Bates has served on boards or governing bodies for 25 entities, two banks, 15 charities, seven businesses or professional organizations and three government entities.

He attributes his inclination to serve others to his parents. He also said his firm has supported community participation.

“This law firm has always been very active in civic and charitable undertakings, and maybe I kind of fell into it, but nobody ever told me, ‘Spend more time working on the law business,’” he said.

Born in Lexington, Bates was a child when his family moved to Jefferson City, where his father worked in state government.

After high school, he joined the U.S. Army in 1944, serving with the 2nd Infantry Division in Europe.

Bates said he was glad to serve in the armed forces. The experience taught him a number of things he later carried into his practice, including how to get along with people and do what you’re told, he said.

“You could beef about it, but you carried out your orders,” he said.

Out of the army, Bates earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri. He went on to the University of Michigan to pursue a law degree, which he earned in 1952.

From a young age, Bates said he had positive interactions

with lawyers in Jefferson City. He said his father was the head of a department that included lawyers, though he was not a lawyer himself, and the fathers of four of his high school classmates were on the Missouri Supreme Court.

Also, it didn’t hurt that Michigan offered him a scholarship, he said.

Bates returned to Missouri to join Lathrop & Norquist, which later merged to become Lathrop Gage. In August, he’ll mark 66 years with the firm.

He started out representing the firm’s railroad clients and handling wills and trusts. He later became the principal attorney for the Armco Steel Company, which presented an opportunity to expand his practice to a variety of corporate issues.

“Whatever Armco’s problem was, that was my specialty,” he said. In addition to his work at Lathrop Gage, Bates has been a

special assistant attorney general and legal counsel for the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners.

He considers six of the positions he’s held to be the most significant: president of The Missouri Bar, president of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce, chairman of the Chamber of Commerce of Greater Kansas City, chairman of the Hawthorn Foundation, chairman of the foundation for Lawyers Encouraging Academic Performance and member of the University of Missouri System’s Board of Curators.

— Jessica Shumaker

Through the past two decades, Kansas City attorney Timothy M. Aylward has had a front-row seat to litigation that has shaped Missouri’s law on

damages caps. “My career has sort of inexplicably been hitched to the

statutory caps, for better or for worse,” he said. In 1992, Aylward represented defendant Children’s Mercy

Hospital in Adams v. Children’s Mercy before the Missouri Supreme Court.

It was the first case to challenge tort-reform legislation Missouri lawmakers passed in 1986 that capped noneconomic damages to $430,000 per defendant. The court ultimately upheld the cap.

Then in 2011, Aylward found himself representing a neurologist in the case of Sanders v. Ahmed, which touched on the issue of caps in wrongful-death cases.

Aylward said he looked to another pending case before the court, Watts v. Cox Medical Center. The Watts case stemmed from stricter caps enacted in 2005.

“Our argument was that wrongful-death actions are created by the legislature, and the legislature has the right to modify causes of actions that it creates,” he said. “Whatever analysis in the Watts case is going to be different because it was a statutory cause of action. The Supreme Court agreed.”

The court upheld the caps in Sanders but later struck down the caps in Watts, creating a situation in which damages are limited in wrongful-death cases but not in cases where people are injured but survive.

Aylward’s career in the legal profession has been equally fortuitous. He became a lawyer after first pursuing journalism. He speaks fondly of his first five years working as a newspaper reporter and editor, first for the Independence Examiner and later for the Topeka Capitol-Journal.

As a reporter, he interviewed Ronald Reagan, Gerald

Ford and Hubert Humphrey. Still, he felt the itch to become a lawyer, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, both of whom were attorneys.

Aylward went back to school and earned a law degree from Washburn University in 1982.

He joined Blackwell Sanders Peper Martin in Kansas City, where he worked for 17 years and handled a variety of cases, including asbestos litigation and medical malpractice-defense litigation.

He also built up a practice representing insurers, which was a key part of his decision to leave the firm with his colleagues Bob Horn and Jim Bandy. The three cofounded Horn Aylward & Bandy in 1999.

“It was a long and very gradual process,” he said. “I loved my years at Blackwell. It was a very happy parting of ways.”

While his work has earned him membership in prestigious legal organizations such as the American College of Trial Lawyers and American Board of Trial Advocates, Aylward said the most important accolades come from his clients when they succeed.

“I was raised to believe you did the best work you could for your client and that was its own reward, and I believe that,” he said.


Timothy M. Aylward

Horn Aylward & Bandy

W.H. “Bert” Bates

Lathrop Gage

“I was raised to believe you did the best work you could for your client and that was its own reward, and I believe that.”

Bates said he was glad to serve in the armed forces. The experience taught him a number of things he later carried into his practice, including how to get along with people and do what you’re told, he said.

Missouri Lawyers Weekly • May 2018 • B5

Susan E. Block

Paule, Camazine & Blumenthal; former Circuit Judge, St. Louis County

Susan Block’s three oldest children were napping one afternoon when she picked up the phone. The busy mom dialed the dean of admissions at Saint Louis University

School of Law. “I asked if I could come back, and he looked at my record and

said, 'Sure,'” Block said, from her offices at Paule, Camazine & Blumenthal in Clayton. “But I had to figure out what I was going to say that night to my husband. I’ve just applied to law school in the middle of the day.”

Block had a few years of law school under her belt. She’d originally planned on a career in social work after growing up in a Western Pennsylvania steel-mill town, but her father urged her to go to law school. She agreed to try it for a year, and if she didn’t like it, she would study social work. She entered law school at George Washington University at age 20, one of nine women among 900 students. She married shortly after the end of her first year and moved to St. Louis with her husband.

After he was drafted to serve in the Vietnam War, she took law-school classes at SLU to distract herself from a boring day job. Once three of her four children came along, though, she took a seven-year break before placing that naptime call.

When she graduated at age 30, she found a position with attorney Murray Stone, running his office in St. Louis while he worked in Jefferson City as a state representative.

“You really had to learn how to deal in a man’s world,” Block said. “And you also had to gain the confidence of clients that, as being a woman lawyer, you could provide them with the same strength of representation as a man could.”

She was standing in a traffic-court-docket line, waiting on a late judge, when she made a decision that would define the next step of her career.

“I said to the guy standing next to me, ‘I can do this job,'” Block said. “He laughed, and of course he didn’t take me seriously.”

Stone, too, told her she didn’t have much chance in the race for magistrate judge against a popular, 10-year incumbent. But Block

had been involved in women’s politics in St. Louis for several years, and she wanted to make a point about the lack of women judges in city and county courtrooms. She won, and she was sworn in as associate circuit judge when the system shifted away from a partisan election system.

Then-Gov. Mel Carnahan later promoted her to circuit judge, and she was assigned to the juvenile court. The position allowed her to combine her love of supporting social justice and improving the lives of children with her legal expertise.

“All the issues that I’ve always been interested in in terms of social justice were placed before me,” Block said. “So I just loved that job.”

After seven years in juvenile court, Block faced a transfer but didn’t want to give up working for children and families, so she joined the family-law firm in 2004. Leaving the bench allowed her to continue her work for social justice while maintaining close relationships with her clients and honing her advocacy skills.

“Advocating doesn’t mean having the loudest voice in the courtroom,” Block said. “Advocating doesn’t mean having a trial for every case. Advocating means trying to discern — what are the strengths of your case, what are the weaknesses, how to deal with them both and still get a fair result.”

By the time Block stepped away from the judge’s chambers to the law firm, her father had died, but she’s now finally doing what he’d always hoped she’d do.

“I’m not too proud to say my dad was right,” Block said.

— Rachel Webb

“Advocating doesn’t mean having the loudest voice in the courtroom. ... Advocating means trying to discern — what are the strengths of your case, what are the weaknesses, how to deal with them both and still get a fair result.”

Lathrop Gage LLPW.H. “Bert” [email protected]

The choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely upon advertisements. Lathrop Gage LLP, 2345 Grand Boulevard, Suite 2200, Kansas City, MO 64108. For more information, contact Cameron Garrison at 816.292.2000.

Congratulations W.H. “Bert” Bates, chosen as an ICON winner by Missouri Lawyers Weekly for his long-standing commitment to the Missouri legal community.

R

ICON: A person that is revered, see “Bert Bates.”

JA MES B . DEU TSCHCongratulates

2018 Icons Award Honoree

Blitz, Bardgett & Deutsch, LCwww.bbdlc.com

Focused on Matters of Greatest Consequence

120 South CentralSaint Louis, MO 63105

314.863.1500

308 East High St.Jefferson City, MO 65101

573.634.2500

414 E. Broadway St.Columbia, MO 65201

573.355.5045


Kenneth Brostron studied in college to be an elementary school teacher, but he has touched far more students’ lives as an attorney.

As counsel to the board of education for St. Louis Public Schools in the early 1980s, he became lead counsel in the St. Louis school-desegregation case. He also wrote the school system’s interdistrict-transfer plan and won several court orders, which generated millions of dollars for capital improvements in the school system.

“There was a great challenge to try to help the school system create opportunities for kids,” Brostron said. “It was a natural charge for me to do that, but the legal issues were complex and interesting.”

The case, originally brought in 1972, began with a parent who opposed the school-district procedure used to assign students to schools, which resulted in the city’s schools enrolling predominantly one race or another. By the mid-1980s, students were transported between neighborhoods to create more integrated school buildings, new school buildings were built and others modernized in the city, magnet schools were created and students were allowed to choose their schools in both the city and suburban districts. The case was not resolved until 1999 when a federal judge allowed reduced participation.

Brostron graduated from Saint Louis University School of Law in 1974 and immediately joined Lashly & Baer. He’s been there ever since, serving as president from 1986 until earlier this year. His legal career was sparked by a summer job at the firm. Even though he’d originally been interested in a career as an educator, he also had a connection to the law through his grandfather’s position as police chief in St. Louis.

In addition to his work in education, another major area of Brostron’s practice has involved medical-malpractice defense. In his career, he’s seen trials get more detailed as technology has become more ubiquitous in the courtroom.

“Juries get a lot more information than they got when I first started,” Brostron said. “It was pretty high-tech if we had poster board in a case of medical records. Now we

show the entire medical record digitized, and [we] pull out information.”

Despite the introduction of technology, the best attorneys still understand that conversations must happen face-to-face, Brostron said. Young attorneys need to learn how to be a “hard adversary while being a gentleman,” a long-standing legal tradition in St. Louis, he said.

“In law we’ve got to communicate with one another,” he said. “The more that you communicate by email, the less there’s a direct discussion, and there’s more room for misinterpretation.”

Although Brostron’s practice today focuses on medical-malpractice defense, he remains both an educator and a student at heart. In addition to working on his golf game, he’d like to work with young lawyers as a mentor, imparting the lessons he has learned through the years of his experience.

“There’s always an answer to a legal issue; you just have to find it,” Brostron said. “The only thing against you is that you might run out of time. If you don’t have the right answer, you’re probably not asking the right question, so change the question and try again.”

He would also like to see more progress on the issue of school desegregation and improving education for all in the St. Louis area.

“It’s a big, deep-rooted issue that’s going to take many, many, many more years to fix, particularly in St. Louis,” he said. “It’s a lot further along than it was in 1980, but I want to see some tolerance and acceptance continue, but in today’s world that seems to be difficult.”

— Rachel Webb

Kenneth Brostron

Lashly & Baer

“There’s always an answer to a legal issue; you just have to find it.”

David V. Capes quips that his career has been in reverse. It began with what some might see as a pinnacle — as an aide to U.S. Sen. J. William

Fulbright, the powerful and long-serving head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Capes, who graduated in 1971 from the University of Arkansas School of Law, worked for Fulbright until the senator lost a primary election in 1974. He had an early inkling of the importance of the Pentagon Papers, which Fulbright’s office declined to publish before they ultimately were leaked to The New York Times.

Capes got an LL.M. in taxation from Georgetown University and began a five-year career with the Department of Justice, working first as an attorney-advisor to the assistant attorney general and then as a federal prosecutor in the DOJ’s Criminal Tax Section. It gave him a front-row seat to the Watergate scandal.

“It was a little bit like today, with subpoenas flying all over the place,” Capes said.

His prosecutorial work took him to Oklahoma in a criminal tax case against the Phillips Petroleum Company (an offshoot of the Watergate investigation) that culminated in a plea agreement. Capes considered returning to Washington. But his wife was from St. Louis, and he ultimately decided to finish out his federal career with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Missouri, where they could raise a family in the Midwest.

His background and interest in tax law lent itself to investigating white-collar crime — a timely career choice as old-fashioned heists gave way to complex financial frauds.

“When I first came here, everybody wanted to do bank robberies,” he said. “I wanted to do white-collar work.”

In 1980, Capes went into the private sector, joining the venerable tax-law firm of Rosenblum Goldenhersh in St. Louis. It was his law-firm home for 20 years, and Capes said

he “learned everything” from the firm’s co-founder, Stanley Rosenblum. Then in 2001, Capes and several other lawyers struck out on their own, forming Capes, Sokol, Goodman & Sarachan.

Capes’ pre-eminence in tax and white-collar criminal matters grew out of his formative years. Knowing how Congress wrote the laws that now were being turned against his clients and how the Justice Department made use of them, Capes knew how to spot prosecutorial overreach.

“I think I’ve always been lucky to have some history on my side,” he said.

When he was 40, Capes suffered an aneurysm, a terrifying experience that ultimately validated his career decisions.

“I was on a table, and I was looking up wondering if a poster on the wall was the last thing I was going to see,” he said. But as family and colleagues helped him to successfully recover, he said he knew that relationships with people you value are more important than being at the center of events.

Capes, now 72, said he’s been “trying to spread the joy, you might say,” ever since.

“Which I think you have to do in law because you’re dealing with such difficult problems for people,” he said.

— Scott Lauck

David V. Capes

Capes Sokol

His background and interest in tax law lent itself to investigating white-collar crime — a timely career choice as old-fashioned heists gave way to complex financial frauds.


If you ask Don Carmody about his proudest accomplishments, he won’t start by telling you about a case he’s tried. He’ll

tell you about the day in the early 1980s when he saw a driver strike a pedestrian crossing Market Street in downtown St. Louis. The driver fled, and suddenly a non-uniformed police officer jumped into Carmody’s car and directed him to chase the other driver, which he did. Carmody received the St. Louis Grand Jury Good Citizenship Award for his role in the apprehension.

He’ll also tell you about being named to the Chaminade College Prep Sports Hall of Fame (he played everything). You have to work to get him to talk about his legal career, but what a career it’s been.

Carmody started to think about attending law school while he was still a student at Chaminade. His father had a law degree but worked as an accountant, and he encouraged his sons to work in a profession.

“He always felt if you were a professional, then if something went wrong with the company you worked for, you’d have an opportunity to make a living,” Carmody said.

Medicine didn’t appeal to Carmody, as he wasn’t interested in the science requirements. Instead, he centered on law and earned his law degree from the University of Missouri in 1967. He joined what was then a sizeable law firm with about 16 attorneys, but when that firm broke up in 1981, several of his colleagues started a new firm. Carmody felt that wasn’t the right opportunity for him, so he had a phone conversation with a former law school classmate.

They began to concoct a plan to start their own firm. Carmody joined Leo MacDonald, Timothy Wolf and Jack Hilton in the creation of Carmody, MacDonald, Hilton and Wolf. At the time, Carmody was 38 years old, with three young sons — a risky choice, given the demanding pace of running a law firm.

“You have to be able to survive both by your level of performance as a lawyer, plus you also have the financial

side. They’re both very, very important,” Carmody said. “When you’re starting your own firm, your performance has to be there because you can’t rely on everybody else.”

Today, the firm has 45 attorneys with a focus on business, banking, finance and related areas of law. Don Carmody is considered to be instrumental in creating the firm’s collegial atmosphere and its emphasis on close relationships with clients. He also emphasizes a dedication to excellence that he feels young people considering the law should apply to their own work.

No matter what people choose to do, they should strive to be the best at it, Carmody believes.

“You want to do things the proper way and be the best that you could be and have a good product and good group around you,” he said.

Despite having amassed more than 45 years of legal practice, Carmody has no plans to slow down. He golfs occasionally, but much of his free time is spent with his wife and grandkids. The word "retirement" is not part of his vocabulary.

“My professional goal is to be the best that I can be until I no longer want to practice law, and I don’t know when that could possibly be,” he said.

— Rachel Webb

Donald R. Carmody

Carmody MacDonald

“My professional goal is to be the best that I can be until I no longer want to practice law, and I don’t know when that could possibly be.”

The choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely upon advertisements.

missouri: 714 Locust Street • St. Louis, Missouri 63101 • phone: 314.621.2939

illinois: 20 East Main Street • Belleville, Illinois 62220 • phone: 618.233.5587 (by appointment only)

www.lashlybaer.com

ashly & Baer, P.C. thanks Kenneth C. Brostron for his dedication to the

practice of law and to the firm for 44 years and counting. For 30 of those years, Ken managed a growing law firm, all while pursuing ground-breaking litigation and obtaining many of the most substantive defense verdicts in the state. We congratulate him on his success and being selected as a Missouri Lawyers Weekly ICON Award recipient.

Kenneth C. Brostron Honored As Icon Award Recipient

Lashly & Baer, p.c.a t t o r n e y s a t l a w

L


Terry Crouppen’s father, Alvin, spent his career in courthouses, but he wasn’t an attorney or a judge. After emigrating from Russia, he became a bail bondsman.

The job drew him close to lawyers in St. Louis, and he pushed son Terry to pursue a career in the legal field.

“He came from a place where justice didn’t mean much, and when he got here, he was very taken with the system,” Crouppen said. “He was part of it in his way and I think he always dreamed of being a lawyer but he had no formal education. Every chance he got, he’d say ‘Terry I want you to be a lawyer. It’s the best thing you can do with your life.’ I sort of inherited my father’s dream.”

After graduating from Washington University School of Law in 1971, Crouppen started his career in the St. Louis Public Defender’s Office. After a few years of trying cases, he and a few friends from law school decided to start their own firm. Drawn to the possibility of creating their own destiny and being their own bosses, the group formed Crouppen, Walther and Zwiebelman, eventually joined by fellow name partner Ron Brown.

Initially, the firm represented both criminal defendants and personal-injury plaintiffs before dropping the former and focusing on the latter. He found the fields intersect in compatible ways.

“Generally, it’s one person against the system, the individual against a far larger adversary on the other side,” Crouppen said. “In one instance, it’s the state, and the other instance it’s big insurance companies.”

Today, Brown & Crouppen is one of Missouri’s top personal-injury firms, with 40 attorneys, according to Missouri Lawyers Weekly’s 2017 edition of The Firms. By its own count, the firm has recovered more than $850 million for clients. Crouppen attributes part of its success to marketing and advertising.

“I always had the idea that I bet if we could use the media, and generally radio and television, we could appeal to a lot of people and build a large practice far quicker than the

traditional ways people built law practices up,” Crouppen said. Throughout his career, Crouppen has seen the law field

become more technical and complex. He said he’s also noticed that the reputation of lawyers has fallen, while jokes about attorneys have become commonplace.

“I think lawyers had a great deal higher place in American society in terms of respect, and I think that’s a shame because what lawyers do really hasn’t changed,” Crouppen said. “I think

there are many entities in America today that have a vested interest in making lawyers look crass, unimportant and greedy. They use it to keep their power.”

Crouppen advises prospective attorneys to let the lawyer jokes roll off their backs and remember why they’re in the field.

“Never forget what you’re doing — bringing justice to the world,” Crouppen said. “It’s my opinion and thought that human affairs don’t always work out the way they ought to. The law is a way of bringing justice and goodness to the world.”

Outside of the office, Crouppen spends time with his wife Tina and their eight grandchildren.

“I’m very lucky and very blessed to get to do pretty much what I want and enjoy what I do,” Crouppen said.

— Rachel Webb

When associates ask him whether they should specialize or take a more general tack in their careers, John W. Cowden said he encourages

them to consider the area of law that most interests them. “I always tell them, if you have a real interest in

something and you think it’d be fun, you’re going to have a better job if you follow that, rather than the luck of the draw,” said Cowden, a co-chair of Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice in Kansas City.

Cowden points to his own experience as proof. He primarily defends companies in the aviation industry and handles cases in the areas of product liability and commercial law.

“Ever since I was a little boy, I loved airplanes, I loved cars and trucks,” he said. “Those were the things I liked to learn about, so aviation in particular has been a field that I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.”

Cowden is a 1970 graduate of the University of Missouri School of Law. On the day he graduated, he was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army, but he didn’t immediately start his service.

Instead, he joined the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, working under former U.S. Sen. John Danforth, another ICON Awards honoree.

The week after he was sworn in as a member of The Missouri Bar, he had to return to the Supreme Court for his first arguments before the high court, Cowden said.

“I was more nervous for that court appearance than any time since,” he said. “It was truly baptism by fire.”

After a yearlong stint in the Attorney General’s office, he served in the Army, where he was assigned to the Judge Advocate General Corps.

When he left the Army, he joined the Kansas City firm Morrison Hecker, where he worked for 18 years. He left in

1989 to join Baker & Sterchi, the forerunner of the firm where he remains today.

Cowden said he is most proud of the “bet-the-company” type of cases he’s taken on, including one involving an airplane manufacturer in the 1990s, which was tried in Alabama. The suit followed a plane crash resulting in deaths.

“I knew if we lost the case, the company was going to declare bankruptcy,” he said. “We tried the case and we won the case, so the company survived.”

Cowden said he also is proud of a case in which he temporarily switched over to the plaintiffs' bar — a wrongful-death case involving a man who died in jail.

Cowden said the young man had come to the United States from Africa after his village raised funds for him to obtain a college education and return to lead the village. The case settled, and the young man’s family used part of the proceeds to send another brother to the United States in his place.

“It didn’t turn me into a plaintiffs' lawyer, but it was very satisfying,” he said.


John W. Cowden

Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice

Terry B. Crouppen

Brown & Crouppen

“Ever since I was a little boy, I loved airplanes, I loved cars and trucks. Those were the things I liked to learn about, so aviation in particular has been a field that I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.”

“Never forget what you’re doing — bringing justice to the world. It’s my opinion and thought that human affairs don’t always work out the way they ought to. The law is a way of bringing justice and goodness to the world.”


Jack Danforth remembers the moment he knew he wanted to go into politics. On a family trip to Washington, D.C., when he was 10, Danforth visited the U.S. Senate gallery to watch a debate.

“I looked down and I remember vividly saying to myself, ‘I’d like to do that someday,’” Danforth said. “And I also remember word for word what my father said as we were leaving the Senate gallery. He said, ‘What a bunch of blowhards.’”

At 81, Danforth, the elder statesman of a bygone era of national politics, now finds himself embracing both of those sentiments. It was “both an honor and a joy” to serve in the Senate, he said, but now lawmakers spend their time demonstrating ideological purity and fending off election challengers instead of legislating.

“I loved it when I did it — really loved it,” he said. “But I’d hate it now.”

Things were different when Danforth began his political career. He was elected as Missouri’s attorney general in 1968, making him Missouri’s only statewide Republican elected official. At the time, he said, Democrats had dominated state politics for so long that the party had become “moribund,” and Republicans came to office as reformers.

“I think we injected some enthusiasm into state politics that had been lacking,” he said.

Danforth remained the state’s top lawyer until the 1976 election propelled him to the U.S. Senate. He served three six-year terms and probably could have won another election, he said, but he didn’t want politics to consume his entire life.

“I just wanted to come home,” he said.Danforth, who had worked as a tax lawyer at Davis Polk &

Wardwell in New York early in his career, returned to the practice of law — first with Bryan Cave in St. Louis and then, in 2015, with Dowd Bennett.

Of course, he was hardly done with politics. In 1999, he led a Justice Department investigation into the disastrous 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. And in 2004 he briefly served as ambassador to the United Nations.

But Danforth is perhaps best known these days for his

denunciations of modern politics, even within his own party. As an ordained Episcopal priest, he delivered a searing eulogy for Tom Schweich, an aide to the Waco investigation who killed himself in 2015 while running as a Republican for Missouri governor. Danforth, citing rumors that had circulated within Republican circles about Schweich, told mourners that his suicide was “the natural consequence of what politics has become.”

Last year, Danforth wrote in The Washington Post that President Donald Trump was “the most divisive president in our history.” His tone hasn’t softened in the intervening year.

“Personally, I have nothing in common with Donald Trump,” he said. “I don’t consider him a Republican.”

But Danforth has seen political transformations before. He’d like to see them again.

“Most people in the public are not on the fringes. They’re somewhere in the center,” he said.

“But the center has been destroyed in American politics. Reconstituting it isn’t going to be done by the insiders. It’s going to be done by just people who engage themselves in politics and are uncomfortable with the two poles.”

— Scott Lauck

John C. Danforth

Dowd Bennett;former U.S. Senator

Danforth is perhaps best known these days for his denunciations of modern politics, even within his own party.

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A textbook case of sex discrimination in broadcast journalism propelled Dennis Egan’s employment-law practice in the early 1980s.

As a young lawyer at Gage & Tucker in Kansas City, Egan represented Christine Craft, a Kansas City anchorwoman for KMBC-TV, in her 1981 suit against the station in which she claimed station management demoted her because of her age and attractiveness.

Craft brought claims of sex discrimination, fraud and violations of the Equal Pay Act against the station in federal court in Kansas. The suit resulted in a 1983 verdict against the station for $500,000 in damages.

“That case was followed by every station in town — every network, for some reason — for the issues it raised about appearance,” he said.

In 1985, Egan moved to the Popham Law Firm to further his employment-law practice. He remains there today.

“I have not looked back since because it was a match made in heaven,” he said.

Egan is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Law. He said he didn’t initially set out to go to law school, but while obtaining an undergraduate degree in journalism at Mizzou, he developed both speaking skills and curiosity about the legal field. He found it was a good fit.

Looking back on his four decades as a lawyer, Egan pointed to two other standout cases of which he’s proud: Sprint v. Mendelsohn, and Cox v. Kansas City Chiefs Football Club Inc., in Missouri state court. Both cases were age-discrimination cases that touched on the issue of admissibility of “me-too” evidence, or evidence from people who aren’t parties in a discrimination case but claim they were subjected to similar mistreatment by a defendant.

The cases went to the U.S. Supreme Court and the Missouri Supreme Court, respectively. Egan was able to

obtain rulings in favor of the plaintiffs in each case. Outside of his practice, he is proud of his work with the

National Employment Lawyers Association, or NELA. He served on NELA’s board of directors for 12 years and helped to establish a trial boot camp for the organization.

He also helped to found Kansas City’s affiliate of NELA in 1993. He was instrumental in starting the affiliate’s Second Chair program, which connects young attorneys with more senior attorneys to obtain help on cases going to trial.

Egan is passionate about passing his knowledge along to others. When giving talks about trial practice, he said he stresses that lawyers always should be improving their work.

“You have to be a student of your craft. You have to continue to work on it,” he said. “You have to continue jump shots to be Michael Jordan or LeBron [James]. It’s the same with trial lawyers.”

He also said the work of a trial lawyer isn’t just about obtaining big verdicts.

“The big deal is to be able to enjoy what you do and help people, and help other lawyers,” he said. “It’s just paying it forward.”


James B. Deutsch had no specific career path in mind when he entered law school. In fact, he said, he hadn’t seriously planned to go to law school at all — but he was

accepted, and so he went. “I came out wanting to be a lawyer,” he said. Deutsch, who served in the Marine Corps from 1968

to 1970, graduated cum laude from the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law in 1978. He became a staff attorney for the Great Plains Legal Foundation, where he primarily focused on federal administrative law and procedure.

While there, he said he gained a great deal of experience, but he left the think tank after deciding he was not accomplishing his self-imposed goal.

“I’d had enough thinking and wanted to be a lawyer,” he said.

In 1979 he joined Dowell, McNearney, Desselle and Calton, handling everything from cases in collections court to appellate work. During that time, he also served as the assistant city attorney in Greenwood.

In the early 1980s, Missouri was running out of money. Deutsch moved to Jefferson City to serve as general counsel for the Missouri Department of Revenue, which faced a huge backlog of tax cases, he said.

“We tried to turn them into some revenue for the state of Missouri,” he said.

Due to Deutsch’s tax experience, in late 1983 then-Gov. Kit Bond appointed him as a commissioner on the Missouri Administrative Hearing Commission. During his six-year appointment as an administrative law judge on the commission, he presided over the well-publicized case involving the collapse of the Hyatt Regency Kansas City Skywalk. He was assigned to the case despite his relative lack of seniority.

“That was kind of an opportunity presented to me,” he said.

Nearing the end of his appointment in 1989, Deutsch was approached by law-school classmate and then-Attorney

General William Webster to serve in the attorney general’s office.

As Chief Deputy Attorney General, Deutsch coordinated multistate litigation, reviewed legal opinions and stood in on occasion for Webster, who was running for governor at the time.

His tenure at the attorney general’s office also presented the opportunity to accomplish a goal many young attorneys set for themselves: to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet while looking back on his career, Deutsch spoke more about hiring and educating young attorneys than his time in front of the high court.

The nature of working in the attorney general’s office led to considerable staff turnover, he said, and he frequently hired and mentored new, young attorneys. It is a job he has carried through to the firm he founded, Blitz, Bardgett & Deutsch.

“His leadership and management style is encouraging and respectful to all individuals,” according to a peer who nominated him for the ICON Award.

With retirement looming, Deutsch said he is looking forward to passing the torch to young attorneys he has mentored and to continuing his work with the International Masters of Gaming Law. Deutsch helped to found the IMGL, which brings together gaming attorneys, regulators, educators, executives and consultants from around the world.

“[IMGL] is a great source of pride and satisfaction to me,” he said.

— Allyssa Dudley

James B. Deutsch

Blitz, Bardgett & Deutsch

Dennis E. Egan

Popham Law Firm

“You have to be a student of your craft. You have to continue to work on it,” he said. “You have to continue jump shots to be Michael Jordan or LeBron [James]. It’s the same with trial lawyers.”

“[International Masters of Gaming Law] is a great source of pride and satisfaction to me.”


Sandra Farragut-Hemphill

Circuit Judge, St. Louis County

Judge Sandra Farragut-Hemphill was the first African American person, male or female, to be appointed to

the St. Louis County bench in 1991. After her appointment to the associate circuit court, she waited 23 years to be elevated by Gov. Jay Nixon to the circuit court in 2014. This brings up one of her favorite words: perseverance.

“My advice to new attorneys is to persevere. If this is what you want to do, continue to work at it until it becomes a reality,” Farragut-Hemphill said.

Farragut-Hemphill said she knew she wanted to become a lawyer when she was 14 years old and an attorney friend of her father allowed her to hang around his office in the summer doing clerical work and answering phones.

“The seed was planted by my father, who had an eighth-grade education but loved the law and politics. My interest grew from there, and that’s the path I chose,” she said.

Farragut-Hemphill graduated cum laude from Spelman College in Atlanta and attended law school at the University of Florida. Her early legal career included working as an associate at a criminal-law firm in St. Louis, as a staff attorney for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri and as an assistant county counselor. She said her second love is teaching, which she has incorporated into her career by serving as an adjunct professor of law at both Washington University School of Law and Saint Louis University School of Law.

“You have an opportunity to help young people in the learning process about law. You can share practical things such as preparing pleadings as well as sharing your experiences. Legal education is about more than reading a case in a book,” Farragut-Hemphill explained.

Another career highlight: serving as the president of the Missouri Association of Probate and Associate Circuit Judges, again as the first African American to be elected to

that role in the 83-year history of the organization. She said she also is proud of her involvement in the creation of the family court’s Parent Education Program, a mandatory class for divorcing parents.

“I’m very happy with the program. It helps parents learn how to co-parent and communicate at a time when there’s a lot of acrimony, and the great benefit is to the children because it keeps them from becoming pawns,” she said.

Farragut-Hemphill describes herself as a good listener and a people person who enjoys coming to work every day because of her rapport with her co-workers. One of her favorite compliments came from a litigant who told her, “I don’t like what you decided, but at least you were nice about saying it.”

“It’s important as a judge to always give individuals an opportunity to be heard. That’s what people want most when they come to court,” she said.

And Farragut-Hemphill herself plans to continue coming to court for quite some time.

“Even though I’ve been here 26 years, I’m not ready to retire,” she said. “We have a very good work environment with great camaraderie. I’ll retire when I get tired of getting up and coming to work in the morning.”

—Stephanie Maniscalco

“It’s important as a judge to always give individuals an opportunity to be heard. That’s what people want most when they come to court.”

www.pcblawfirm.com • 314.727.2266

Paule, Camazine & Blumenthal, P.C. congratulates our icon, the Honorable Susan Block, on her recognition by Missouri Lawyers Weekly in the Inaugural Class of its Icon Award.

Judge Block defines distinguished and zealous advocacy for our clients and our community.


Shook salutes our friend and partner

Jon R. Gray for earning Missouri Lawyers Media’s 2018 Icon Award for distinguished leaders over 60. We are proud of his many accomplishments.

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Those who nominated Bill Grant for an ICON Award describe him as having a level-headed approach to law and life, as a person who always takes the call from

those in need, as the true image of what a lawyer should be and even as a legend in juvenile and family law.

All are well-deserved but perhaps elaborate phrases for an attorney who espouses a message of simplicity.

“A lot of times we get so focused on the individual cases that we lose sight of the bigger picture. My practice has led me to work on various boards, which helps me to understand where clients are coming from and reminds me of other lifestyles outside of the legal profession,” he said.

The bigger picture for Grant, whose practice at Grant, Miller & Smith focuses on domestic, juvenile and criminal law, includes being able to help kids in the juvenile system.

“It’s the last or one of the last opportunities to make a difference only because they’re young and still forming beliefs, and it’s a chance to help them lead happier lives,” he said.

Grant earned his law degree in 1974 from Washington University and has been serving St. Louis County as a guardian ad litem for almost that long. He gained litigation experience working with noted criminal defense attorney Art Margulis from 1976 to 2013.

Grant currently serves on the Missouri Supreme Court sub-committee of the Commission on Racial and Ethnic Fairness within the Juvenile Court System, the St. Louis County Family and Domestic Violence Council and as a pro bono attorney for the St. Louis Family Drug Court. He has volunteered for the St. Louis Family Court Truancy Court program.

Grant is a founding member and the current president of Caring for Kids, a nonprofit organization that provides essentials to children under the jurisdiction of the county juvenile court.

“Caring for Kids tries to step in and provide basic necessities for parents so the kids can get returned to their care,” Grant said.

His nonprofit work also included three years of experience with the One World Family organization during which he traveled to South Africa to work with children affected by AIDS.

Grant said the foundation for his success is simply an emphasis on integrity combined with a focus on understanding and applying the law.

“I think we all make the practice of law too hard sometimes. Pages of facts will come down to a few key issues. You can save yourself a lot of time and burdensome work by sifting through the facts to find what’s really relevant to the judge or jury,” he said.

He advises newer attorneys to accept that things are not always going to go smoothly and that they should expect the unexpected. He also emphasizes the importance of alternative dispute resolution methods.

“As a nation we have become way too litigious. We settle problems in a number of areas with the court system when there could be other options to consider such as arbitration, mediation or some other type of meeting between the opponents,” he said.

— Stephanie Maniscalco

There were no attorneys in Maurice Graham’s family, no footsteps in which to follow. But he did have a neighbor who was an attorney, and the kind man

spoke often with Graham as a teen.“It sounded interesting,” Graham said.And so, by the time he was an upperclassman in high

school, Graham had decided he wanted to be a lawyer, too.After graduating from the University of Missouri Law

School in 1962, Graham began working with a general-practice firm in Fredericktown. As he took on more and more litigation, however, the boundaries of his practice spread until he was no longer a small-town attorney.

Graham stayed with the firm, Schnapp, Graham & Reid, for around 30 years. But as time passed, his practice became regional and oriented more toward St. Louis than Fredericktown.

In the mid-1990s, he relocated to St. Louis and founded the Graham Law Firm. That move also signaled a shift in his practice, which focused primarily on plaintiffs’ work.

Now as president of Gray, Ritter & Graham, he maintains a full practice in wrongful death and catastrophic injury, product liability, commercial litigation and class action, among other areas. Being an attorney is a terrific honor, he said, considering that people in need seek out attorneys and ask for their help.

“I believe strongly in our profession,” he said. Graham continues to maintain relationships and stay in

touch with clients he represented years ago, saying “I tend to become very close to my clients.” He regards with fondness his term as president of The Missouri Bar from 1988 to 1989; he also served on its board of governors from 1980 to 1990.

As state bar president, Graham said he worked hard with other bar members to obtain adequate funding for the public-defender system. At the time, he said, his team was successful.

Today, however, he finds himself taking up that fight once more. He is assisting with several efforts aimed at ensuring volunteers from the civil bar are available for cases to help alleviate some of the defender system’s burden.

“The public-defender system is simply overworked, and as good of a job as they do, they need help,” Graham said.

While many attorneys at similar points in their careers might be looking towards retirement, Graham said he won’t be slowing down any time soon. He says he cannot imagine not practicing law.

“I enjoy what I do so much,” he said.

— Allyssa Dudley

Maurice B. Graham

Gray, Ritter & Graham

William P. Grant

Grant, Miller & Smith

Being an attorney is a terrific honor, he said, considering that people in need seek out attorneys and ask for their help.

“I believe strongly in our profession,” he said.

“I think we all make the practice of law too hard sometimes. Pages of facts will come down to a few key issues. You can save yourself a lot of time and burdensome work by sifting through the facts to find what’s really relevant to the judge or jury.”


Jon R. Gray began his legal career with the goal of fighting racial injustice. More than 40 years after entering the profession, there’s still plenty to be done.

“I submit that there’s still work to do to truly bring everyone into full citizenship,” Gray said.

Gray, 66, born in Little Rock, Arkansas, to a Methodist minister father and a career educator mother, said he gravitated to the law at an early age. As the civil-rights era heated up, Gray said he noticed how protests and demonstrations were backed up by action in the courts.

“I decided I wanted to do that, and for as long as I can remember, being a lawyer was the only thing I wanted to be,” he said.

Gray served in a variety of roles, including as an assistant county counselor in Jackson County and in private practice. In 1986, then-Gov. John Ashcroft named Gray to the Jackson County Circuit Court. He was the first African American judge to serve on the court, and one of the few for most of his time on the bench.

Gray said he is particularly gratified that the court has become more diverse in the years since his appointment.

“The short lists that have gone to the governor in the last 10 or 12 years looked very different than the short lists that came before then,” he said. “There have been more women. There have been more people of color. There have been more people with government experience … There’s never, in my estimation, been a compromise on quality.”

Gray remained on the bench for more than 20 years. In 2007, he joined Shook, Hardy & Bacon as a partner, though his retirement brought a renewed commitment to the needs of the bench. He served a one-year term as chair of the National Bar Association’s Judicial Council, a position he used to tout the benefits of an independent and diverse judiciary.

He also pushed state lawmakers to allow a long-awaited pay raise for judges to make sure the bench continues to attract and retain skilled lawyers who otherwise might go into private practice.

These days, Gray splits his time between litigation and mediation. He also helps to lead the firm’s professional-development efforts, serving as a “den mother” to young associates and allowing him to help hone their trial skills.

“We want people who are unafraid to get up on their feet and represent our clients vigorously and in a quality fashion,” he said.

At the time of his appointment to the circuit court, Gray was just 10 years out of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. Gray said he’d long wanted to be a judge, but the offer came earlier in his career than he expected. He advises younger lawyers these days to be constantly ready to fulfill a goal when a chance comes along. Then it’s time to set new goals. He tries to follow his own advice.

“I hope I don’t have just one pinnacle,” he said. “I hope I have some pinnacles yet.”

— Scott Lauck

Jon R. Gray

Shook, Hardy & Bacon; former Circuit Judge, Jackson County

“The short lists that have gone to the governor in the last 10 or 12 years looked very different than the short lists that came before then. There have been more women. There have been more people of color. There have been more people with government experience… There’s never, in my estimation, been a compromise on quality.”

grgpc.com

Maurice B. Graham

2018 Icon Award Honoree

We are proud of all the lasting contributions he has made to the

legal profession and to the community as a whole.

Congratulates

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GRAY, RITTER & GRAHAM, P.C.

congratulates partner

Dennis Egan

for being an inaugural recipient of the Icon Awards - truly a distinguished leader in litigation and employment law.

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For Rebecca Magruder, earning a law degree wasn’t so much about practicing law as it was a means to a different end: that of a mediator who helped others

resolve disputes.In 1993, Magruder graduated from Washington

University with a Master of Social Work degree and began her legal education at Saint Louis University School of Law. She sought to emulate her mentor, Robert Benjamin, who earned both a law degree and MSW degree from SLU, and who in the 1970s refocused his career from practicing attorney in St. Louis to mediator.

Now based in California and known nationally for his work in mediation and conflict-resolution, Benjamin has said he realized early in his career that issues facing his clients often reflected underlying conflicts that could be more effectively managed out of court through mediation. Magruder said he suggested that going to law school could help her to establish her credentials and a strong foundation for her career.

“As a mediator, being a lawyer seemed very important,” Magruder said.

When she earned her juris doctorate in 1996, she immediately hung out her own shingle and began practicing family law. But that, too, was simply a strategic step on her way to breaking new ground in mediation.

“I loved what I did,” said Magruder, who operated from an office in St. Charles. “I worked my whole career around it.”

In the world of mediation, what Magruder did was revolutionary, according to those with whom she worked. Magruder herself acknowledged that she did things “differently.” In materials submitted to nominate Magruder for an ICON Award, however, the Collaborative Family Law Association of St. Louis described her use of mediation in family law as a first-of-its-kind approach.

“Twenty or so years ago, when Becky began her mediation practice, the handful of active divorce mediators in her part of Missouri practiced primarily in St. Louis.

Mediation had not yet taken hold in St. Charles and was viewed with a high level of skepticism among family-law attorneys,” association President Susan Amato wrote.

“Now, through Becky’s efforts and gentle, yet insistent and effective influence,” Amato wrote, “the St. Charles County Circuit Court has a rule allowing judges to require the use of mediation in family-law cases and encouraging lawyers and parties to elect mediation to resolve their family-law issues.”

Nearly a dozen other members of the legal community echoed that praise in their own nominations, lauding her as “skillful,” “highly regarded” and the “very definition of an icon.”

Magruder described her style of mediation as akin to facilitation in that she allowed her clients to make their own decisions. She started sessions by asking questions, trying to help clients to find for themselves the cause of the conflicts in which they were involved.

“I gave them space, and I gave them time,” she said.To instill a sense of calm, Magruder set up her office to

resemble an art gallery. There, she aimed to turn her clients away from potentially contentious litigation by instead talking through their problems and reaching a resolution of their choosing.

Magruder encouraged other legal professionals to embrace low-conflict divorces by mentoring and supporting other mediators and attorneys through much of her career. She also was a founding member of the Collaborative Family Law Association and served on its board of directors.

Now retired, Magruder said she still relies on everyday conversations and interactions with others to try to build a world that is a little more peaceful, and a little more conducive to conversation and understanding. She offers this simple but important advice:

“Be kind to people. This world is so stressful,” she said. “If we can help bring about that change, we can make the world a better place.”

— Allyssa Dudley

Rebecca T. Magruder

Rebecca T. Magruder MSW JD

A message that retired U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. would like to impart to all attorneys, young and old, is that obligations come with the

practice of law. “I think in addition to providing legal services for hire,

lawyers have the obligation to provide pro bono service. And I think lawyers have the obligation to provide government service. I like to see lawyers in the legislature, on municipal boards and providing community services through agencies. Lawyers need to be doing all of this, and they should be doing all of this. They owe a duty to the community to pay back,” he said.

Now a senior counsel at Armstrong Teasdale in the litigation practice group, Limbaugh served as a federal judge for the Eastern District of Missouri from 1983 to 2008. He remembers the phone call about the appointment from President Ronald Reagan as a highlight of his career.

Limbaugh began his career doing real estate and title work for his father’s Cape Girardeau law firm after earning his law degree from the University of Missouri in 1951. His father, Rush Limbaugh Sr., lived to be 104.

“I was fortunate to be able to practice with my dad. He was an inspiration. He continued going into his office until the age of 102. He had all of his facilities still,” Limbaugh said. “We have good genes.”

Citing the tendency of lawyers to procrastinate, Limbaugh said he welcomes technology as a positive change in the practice.

“Lawyers tend to work right up to a deadline, and we used to have to race to the clerk’s office to file something by 5 [p.m.]. You really had to get to know your clerks. But now with e-filing, you can do what you need to do late and from your desk, and that’s a big help,” he said.

“Another change I’ve seen that I don’t think is good is the erosion of the right to a jury trial. There’s an emphasis on summary judgment, ADR, and it’s good in many situations to eliminate expense and emotions, but it’s not easy today if you really want a trial,” he added.

Limbaugh keeps busy helping to raise funds for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, playing tennis twice a week and

walking in Forest Park. He said he enjoys his role as a mentor at Armstrong Teasdale.

“Every day younger attorneys come by with assigned work in federal or sometimes state court, and we talk and then they get on with it,” he said. “I think it’s helpful for them to talk with someone who’s been around a little bit.”

Repeating his challenge to lawyers to serve, Limbaugh said he hoped to be remembered for his professionalism.

“Unless you’re a Washington or a Lincoln or a Madame Curie, few people remember you after you’re gone. You’d like to be remembered for honesty and integrity,” he said. “All aspire to this, and few really are."


Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr.

Armstrong Teasdale; former U.S. District Judge, Eastern District of Missouri

“I think in addition to providing legal services for hire, lawyers have the obligation to provide pro bono service. And I think lawyers have the obligation to provide government service. I like to see lawyers in the legislature, on municipal boards and providing community services through agencies. Lawyers need to be doing all of this, and they should be doing all of this. They owe a duty to the community to pay back.”


James A. Polsinelli is “Mr. Polsinelli” in every sense of the nickname. Naturally, he prefers to be called Jim.

As the tiny firm he founded 46 years ago grew into one of the largest law firms in both Missouri and the country, Polsinelli’s surname became synonymous with that of the firm. He tries to take it in stride. Sometimes, when he sees the firm name on the side of the office building, he says, “The letters could be bigger.” He hopes people know he’s kidding.

Jim Polsinelli, 74, founded the firm along with two other lawyers and a bookkeeper in 1972 on Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza. A 1967 graduate of the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, he said he had a sense that some of the more established firms were taking their clients for granted, opening up opportunities.

“Our philosophy, and maybe it was a little trite, was quality work in a timely manner for a fair fee,” he said. “Those were the three stools that we tried to give to every client relationship.”

Polsinelli specializes in mergers and acquisitions and succession planning. Between his practice and his long residency in Kansas City, if you point to a building there’s a good chance that, even if he didn’t play a role in its development, he knows its history or remembers it being built.

He said he regarded cultivating the firm’s personnel as equally important to his law practice. For the first 25 years of the firm’s existence, Polsinelli participated in all hiring decisions, especially those of partners.

“The people were always the most important thing,” he said. “Whether I was right or wrong I don’t know, but my thought was, if we had the right people the clients would follow.”

The Polsinelli law firm now is the second largest by revenue in Missouri and has nearly 800 lawyers in offices

across the country. It has some 350 lawyers in Missouri alone, more than any other in-state firm.

Polsinelli said he never expected the firm to grow that much. In the early days, he said, a firm bylaw capped growth at 25 lawyers.

“Obviously, we kind of blew through that. It was all clearly dictated by client needs,” he said.

Maintaining that culture has required firm leaders to travel frequently to the many offices and help model what lawyers should aspire to be.

“If you’re going to succeed here, you’re going to have to develop that DNA that the rest of us have,” he said.

The firm name could have gone in a different direction. In 2009, what was then Polsinelli Shalton Flanigan Suelthaus merged with Shughart Thomson & Kilroy, another large Kansas City firm, to create today’s giant. Rather than go with an unwieldy seven-name moniker, the firm was known for a time as Polsinelli Shughart, before dropping to just Polsinelli in 2013.

“I didn’t even participate in the discussion or vote or even go to the meeting. I said, ‘Well, if that’s what they want to do that’s fine, and if they want to do something else that’s fine, too.’ Turns out that what they wanted to do,” Polsinelli said. “I think it’s worked out pretty well. It just makes it easier to deal with. It’s not the most common name, so maybe it’s easier to remember.”

— Scott Lauck

James A. Polsinelli

Polsinelli

“The people were always the most important thing. Whether I was right or wrong I don’t know, but my thought was, if we had the right people the clients would follow.”

Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice is pleased to join Missouri Lawyers Weekly in recognizing John W. Cowden as a 2018 ICON award recipient. It is a privilege to count John as our colleague.

The choice of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely on advertisements.

bscr-law.com


Howard Sachs has dreams about the law. The dreams will persist, he supposes, even after he steps down from his role as Senior U.S. District Judge for the

Western District of Missouri. But for now, the 92-year-old wishes to remain.

“The tradition in this district is to stay with the work as long as feasible,” said Sachs, the oldest judge in the 8th Circuit to retain a docket.

Nominated by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, Sachs has spent more than 38 years on the federal bench, and in that time has made his mark on American jurisprudence. It was Sachs who ruled in 1984 that inmates have the right to marry; the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed. In the late 1980s, when federal districts were split on the constitutionality of new federal sentencing guidelines, Sachs wrote the majority opinion in his district arguing in their favor. The nation’s high court affirmed that ruling, too.

Sachs developed a hands-on style of presiding over cases during his tenure, sometimes asking questions of witnesses himself to clarify the issues at hand. He revealed his esteem for the judiciary upon sentencing one of his own: in 2003, a former Missouri associate circuit judge pleaded guilty to soliciting a bribe to dismiss a case. Sachs went beyond the requests made by both the defense and the government in sentencing the judge to four years.

Although Sachs attained senior-judge status 25 years ago, he has not exactly faded into the background. As recently as April 2017, Sachs granted Planned Parenthood a preliminary injunction in its suit against Missouri, invalidating state legislation mandating that abortion doctors have hospital affiliations and abortion clinics meet requirements imposed on ambulatory surgical centers.

Before ever donning a judge’s robe, Sachs worked in private practice for nearly three decades, first at Phineas Rosenberg and then at Spencer Fane Britt & Browne. He handled matters related to labor law, property disputes and other issues.

Sachs played a central role in the integration of the Kansas City Bar Association. By 1955, that organization was explicitly closed to women and unofficially closed to black and Hispanic lawyers. When the KCBA’s leadership rejected applications from three black candidates that year, Sachs and 15 colleagues – many of them World War II veterans like Sachs, who had

served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific – chose to stand up for them. The KCBA fully integrated within months.

Sachs had grown up in a Jewish family in Kansas City. His parents were friends of Harry and Bess Truman, and the two families kept up a correspondence for years, some 200 pages of which is now preserved in the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum. Sachs has spent much free time in that library researching pre-war letters to then-Sen. Truman from German and Polish Jews trying to get visas to the United States.

Now in the twilight of his legal career, Sachs said he looks out on the U.S. legal system and has concerns. He believes criminal punishment can fail to act as a deterrent and prove harmful to both defendants and their families. He also is worried about confusion arising from the differences between federal and state sentences for similar offenses.

He humbly points out that he has “no big solutions” to these large-scale problems. Rather, he focuses on what he can contribute to Missouri’s Western District: “to help out with the docket and (sometimes) to work the system as I think best for the parties, hopefully guided by thought and experience not available to some other colleagues.”

— Nicholas Phillips

Brendan Ryan’s original career track did not lead to law school. The St. Louis native had been active in high school sports, and he once hoped to return to that

realm as a coach.He’d been studying history and political science at the

University of Missouri, with a goal of becoming a teacher. But in 1956, as he was driving from St. Louis to Columbia, he was in a head-on collision. He woke up in the hospital eight days later, and in the months of recovery and rehabilitation that followed, he missed a good many of his classes. To stay on his graduation schedule, he switched to a degree program that included law school.

“I wasn’t sure I wanted to practice law, but I knew I wanted a legal education,” said Ryan, now a retired circuit judge and mediator.

Ryan graduated from the University of Missouri School of Law in 1961. By November 1962, he was working for St. Louis Circuit Attorney Daniel P. Reardon, and by 1963 he was trying criminal cases.

In 1969 Ryan was appointed circuit attorney, and in 1972 he was elected to the position. But when then-Gov. Kit Bond vetoed a pay-raise measure that affected circuit attorneys, Ryan said he considered its impact on his wife and children and decided it was time to go into private practice.

With his high school friend John King, Ryan established a firm that handled everything from zoning and real estate to tax issues. Ryan handled most of the trial work until he left the firm in 1979 due to his appointment to circuit court in St. Louis.

Ryan spent 20 years — and some months, he adds — on the bench. For years, he kept track of details of cases in which he presided on legal pads — the attorney’s names, the amounts requested, the expert witnesses — all meticulously written by hand.

Toward the end of his judicial service, Ryan was offered a speaking spot at a seminar for mediators. It would inspire the next stage of his career.

Ryan estimates he’s handled nearly 3,000 mediations, and he said his experience as an attorney and judge has helped

him as a mediator. As in every other phase of his professional life, more days than not he enjoys going to work.

In the past few years, however, he said the pace of his work has slowed. While he has no official retirement date, Ryan said other attorneys will let him know when to do so — the calls for his services will stop.

And then, Ryan said, he’ll be on to the next chapter of his career of 50-plus years. His wife won’t let him sit around the house too much, he said, and that is fine with him.

“Every time I’ve made a career change, I’ve enjoyed the new job more than the old,” he said.

— Allyssa Dudley

Brendan Ryan

Neutral-Alaris; former Circuit Judge, St. Louis City

Howard F. Sachs

Senior U.S. District Judge, Western District of Missouri

In 1969 Ryan was appointed Circuit Attorney, and in 1972 he was elected to the position. But when then-Gov. Kit Bond vetoed a pay-raise measure that affected circuit attorneys, Ryan said he considered its impact on his wife and children and decided it was time to go into private practice.

Although Sachs attained senior-judge status 25 years ago, he has not exactly faded into the background.


Upon leaving law school in Miami, Florida, Mary Sheffield hoped for a career immersed in global treaties and conventions — until she moved with her

husband to a small town in Missouri.“It was not exactly a hotbed of international law,” said

Sheffield, a North Carolina native. “But I thought: A lawyer can work anywhere.”

She was right. After practicing law in Salem and Rolla, Sheffield was elected to serve as associate circuit judge in Phelps County in 1983. She won a 25th Circuit judgeship in 2004, then was appointed in 2012 to the Missouri Court of Appeals Southern District, a seat she has retained.

As things turned out, she didn’t have to forego her initial dream. While her career unfolded in Missouri, she was appointed in 2003 as one of the International Liaison Network Judges for the Hague Convention on Child Abduction. She remains one of only four American judges to hold this position, in which she coordinates with the State Department and helps her domestic colleagues to understand the Convention and to confer with judges abroad. She has represented the United States on Convention issues in more than a dozen countries, fulfilling her earlier ambition of international legal work.

“Life can be a circle,” she said. Apart from her interest in cross-border child abduction,

Sheffield is concerned with problems local families face. As an associate circuit judge in Phelps County working on domestic dockets, she learned of abused women who had to publicly request loans from their local city councils to find temporary shelter. Sheffield considered that to be an inadequate solution and co-founded Russell House, which provides victims of domestic violence with shelter and court-advocacy services. The judge herself remembers installing floor tiles and sheetrock at the original facility in Rolla.

In addition, she brought the Court Appointed Special Advocate program to her 25th Circuit. CASA volunteers advocate for children in abuse and neglect court proceedings.

In 2004, the Missouri Supreme Court appointed Sheffield to chair its Family Court Committee, a leadership role she held until 2015. She now chairs the Domestic Violence and Human Trafficking Committee.

And yet for all of her involvement in family courts, it doesn’t even represent her favorite branch of the law.

“The one I enjoy intellectually is criminal law,” she said, “and I never thought I would.” She likes grappling with the constitutional issues that criminal cases entail, and she watches closely as appeals wend their way up to the higher courts. Her aim is to see if she interpreted the law in a useful way.

“I follow that very closely,” she said. Upon being overturned, she takes no offense, and learns from it. “I want some guidance.”

When she first took the bench in the 1980s, she recalls only about a dozen female colleagues in Missouri’s judiciary. Yet she didn’t let that intimidate her, and she made her own way. Now she endeavors to help out all younger attorneys, male or female.

“People helped me along the way,” she said. “So if I can give you a hand, why shouldn’t I?”


John Sandberg is a lawyer who sails part-time. Sometimes, he jokes, he’d rather be a sailor who practices law part-time.

As an amateur seaman, Sandberg has logged serious nautical miles. He has hand-steered boats across the Atlantic Ocean twice and navigated the Great Circle Route around the eastern United States and Canada for an epic six-month journey with his family.

Meanwhile, back home in St. Louis, he’s best known as one of the city’s top business litigators.

After graduating from the University of Missouri School of Law in 1972, Sandberg worked at Coburn, Croft, Shepherd & Herzog, where he developed a taste for trial work.

In 1979, he and some colleagues decided to strike out on their own and launch Sandberg Phoenix. Work poured in immediately. Sandberg recalls how he and his partners all worked late into the night during those first three years.

Two of Sandberg’s biggest cases at his own firm have put him on the plaintiffs’ side, particularly in the commercial realm. One unfolded in the mid-1980s. He represented Monsanto in a suit brought against Koch Industries, alleging that the latter had sold faulty equipment to Monsanto to be used inside a distillation tower. After a six-week trial in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, Sandberg won a verdict for Monsanto, with Koch Industries paying more than $7 million.

More recently, Sandberg represented a St. Charles-based phone company, Omniplex Communications, after it went bankrupt and sued Lucent Technologies for having sold defective switches. The exact settlement amount agreed upon in 2005 remains confidential but was reported in local press accounts at $50 million.

On the defense side, Sandberg once was retained by a neurosurgeon in St. Louis County to fight a $3 million

claim of wrongful death related to treatment in a hospital emergency unit. Sandberg won a verdict for his client.

After more than four decades of practicing law, Sandberg says he feels like a trial attorney at heart.

“I like discovery less and less, but I like trials more and more,” he said. “I like trying to figure out how to convince a jury that your side’s right.”

That said, Sandberg has an appreciation for the written

word, too. He was the managing editor of the Missouri Law Review during law school, and more recently he became a volunteer editor of the Civil Practice and Procedure section of The Missouri Bar’s Courts Bulletin for the Eastern District Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court. In addition, during his off hours, he participates in two book clubs.

He also itches to get back on the water. Sandberg sold his boat in 2000, when his five children (two of whom are attorneys) began heading off for college. He has kept his skills sharp in the meantime by racing a friend’s boat in the Chicago Yacht Club Race to Mackinac five times. But he hopes to acquire another seaworthy vessel for himself eventually.

“I keep an eye out,” he said.


John S. Sandberg

Sandberg Phoenix & von Gontard

Mary W. Sheffield

Judge, Missouri Court of Appeals, Southern District

“I like discovery less and less, but I like trials more and more. I like trying to figure out how to convince a jury that your side’s right.”

When she first took the bench in the 1980s, she recalls only about a dozen female colleagues in Missouri’s judiciary. Yet she didn’t let that intimidate her...


One of Dorothy White-Coleman’s proudest accomplishments is graduating from law school, especially because most of her closest friends

advised her not to go. “They were immediately concerned about me when I was

accepted into law school and said, ‘Why would you give up a good job and benefits?’ They said, ‘You’re smart but not that smart.’ ‘Stay where you are,’ they told me. I’m glad I didn’t listen to their advice,” she said, laughing.

White-Coleman had been employed as a social worker for the state and then as a social worker for children in foster and adoptive placements. She remembers these were the only jobs she could get at the time with a political science degree. The work spurred her to apply for law school because she kept running into legal obstacles.

“Social workers do the same things that lawyers do as far as trying to help people. The job made me want to reform the juvenile court system. It was hard to get the kids through the adoptive process, and it made me understand that there are always two sides to the picture,” she said.

After graduating from Saint Louis University School of Law with honors in 1981, White-Coleman clerked for Judge Floyd Gibson of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She became a defense litigator at Husch Blackwell and a partner at Peoples, Hale & Coleman before starting White, Ovletrea & Watson, an all-female African American law firm. She lists this as a second career highlight.

“Our dream was to start a boutique African American law firm for patent, trademark and business litigation at a time when there was nothing in St. Louis quite like that,” she said.

“I’m really proud of it because together the three of us did things we didn’t think we could do. We grew to eight lawyers and three legal assistants, and we serviced major legal

corporations, practicing in areas that other African American firms did not,” she said.

Her practice at her current firm, White Coleman & Associates, includes business and commercial litigation, contracts, franchise law and trademark and copyright infringement. It’s a long way from social work, but she continues to work with the younger generation through an ongoing role with the St. Louis Internship Program. She said she always will be involved in mentoring because she lacked role models in her youth.

“I became interested in law by watching Perry Mason. I didn’t think about him as a Caucasian man because I just loved the way he did his job with professionalism and with the goal of revealing the truth. I didn’t have any African American role models, so to the extent I can open my firm and expose young people to the practice, I will always do it,” she said.

“What I like about my job is what I like about the practice of law. I’m never bored, and I never remember watching the clock. Every day is something different even though we are often servicing the same clients,” she said.

“I love being a student of the law,” she added. “I’ve been practicing for more than 30 years, but I’ll never know everything.”


Dorothy L. White-Coleman

White Coleman & Associates

“I’m really proud of it because together the three of us did things we didn’t think we could do. We grew to eight lawyers ... practicing in areas that other African American firms did not.”

Charlie Weiss, one of the state’s elite litigators, very nearly didn’t attend law school.

By 1965, he had other options. News reporting was one. He had just earned a journalism degree at the University of Missouri and spent summers writing for papers in his native Perry County.

Academia was another option. Weiss was still at MU finishing up a second degree — a bachelor’s in History — and already had a fellowship lined up elsewhere to pursue a doctorate in American History. At one point, he considered diplomacy and sat for the Foreign Service Officer Test.

Then a chaplain at MU’s Newman Center urged Weiss to apply for a scholarship to Notre Dame Law School, which was recruiting public-university students. He did, and he won a full ride. He graduated with honors in 1968, clerked for Judge M.C. Matthes on the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and then took a job at Bryan, Cave, McPheeters & McRoberts in 1969.

When Weiss arrived at that firm, he was the 30th attorney in its sole office in St. Louis. Now the firm is called Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, with 32 offices in 11 countries staffed by 1,600 lawyers. Weiss is one of its most respected. A septuagenarian, Weiss retains a certain old-school sensibility: he is unfailingly courteous and still speaks aloud his legal arguments into a dictaphone for assistants to type up.

Weiss’s biggest case occurred somewhat early in his career. In 1979, Northrop sued McDonnell Douglas regarding the rights to be the prime contractor for foreign sales of the F-18 Hornet. Weiss became one of the lead attorneys for McDonnell Douglas and helped to secure those rights for his client in 1985 as part of a $50 million settlement. He went on to represent other large companies such as KV Pharmaceuticals, Savvis and Maritz.

During nearly 50 years practicing law, Weiss has tried approximately 100 civil cases and 20 criminal cases to judgment.

He has been inducted into the selective American College of Trial Attorneys and served as president of The Missouri Bar and the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis. He has engaged in numerous arbitrations and mediations, taken more than 1,200 depositions and appeared in cases in various federal district and

appeals courts. In addition, Weiss has appeared in two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of criminal defendants and prevailed in both.

Weiss’s pro bono work for the wrongfully convicted at times has grabbed national headlines. In his first such case, Weiss and his colleague at Bryan Cave, Steven R. Snodgrass, freed Missouri inmate Josh Kezer after Kezer spent 16 years in prison for a homicide he didn’t commit. Kezer’s case filled an episode of 48 Hours and resulted in a $4 million settlement.

In 2012, Weiss and Snodgrass helped convince the Cole County Circuit Court to overturn the murder conviction of St. Louisan George Allen, who had spent 30 years in prison after police failed to disclose evidence of his innocence. That case resulted in a settlement of $13.8 million for Allen’s family.

Most recently, they advocated for David Robinson of southeast Missouri, claiming to have evidence that exonerated him of a murder in 2000. The Missouri Supreme Court agreed, and on May 14 Robinson was released from the Jefferson City Correctional Center. Weiss and Snodgrass have teamed up with other attorneys on these and other innocence cases, some of which are still pending.

For now, Weiss has no post-retirement plans because he doesn’t want to retire.

“Working is good for your health,” he says. “For me, the practice of law is still fun.”


Charles Weiss

Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner

“Working is good for your health. For me the practice of law is still fun.”


While attending the University of Minnesota Law School, Michael A. Wolff worked from 1967 until he graduated in 1970 as a reporter and

copy editor at the former Minneapolis Star newspaper. He loved the work, he said, but “in the day of family-owned newspapers, you needed to have your father ahead of you — and my father’s name wasn’t on the masthead.”

“When you grow up without any money, you want to be a professional,” said Wolff, a native of Rochester, Minnesota. “I didn’t have lawyers in my family, and I didn’t know any. I just knew I wanted to be able to chart my own credentials and course.”

Wolff would amass other credentials in the next six decades — judicial clerk, legal-aid attorney, professor, dean and author, with stints in between as political advisor and Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice. The common thread linking each step: his long-standing belief in the value of public service.

“I was fortunate enough to get a clerkship after law school with [U.S. District Judge Miles W. Lord for the District of Minnesota], who had been in politics. He was a close friend of Hubert Humphrey, [and] he gave Walter Mondale his first job in politics,” Wolff said. “There was a sense of public-service advocacy in the air.”

Wolff spent a year with Lord and another as a staff attorney with Legal Assistance of Ramsey County in Saint Paul, Minnesota. More legal-aid work followed in Denver and Rapid City, South Dakota, while his wife completed medical-residency programs. In 1975, his wife’s pediatrics residency at Washington University brought them to St. Louis, where Wolff became an assistant professor at Saint Louis University School of Law.

Wolff became a professor in 1980 and held secondary appointments at SLU in the Schools of Medicine and Public Health. He also practiced full-time with a firm specializing in litigation while on leave in 1981-82.

After unsuccessfully running for state Attorney General, Wolff joined Mel Carnahan’s gubernatorial campaign as research director in 1992. When Carnahan won the office, Wolff served

as his transition director and later chief counsel. In 1994, he returned to the law school — though he remained as special counsel in Carnahan’s administration to work with lawmakers, officials and leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City on school desegregation. In 1998, he was appointed to the Supreme Court, where he served as chief justice from 2005 to 2007.

While on the court, Wolff chaired the Sentencing Advisory Commission from 2004 to 2011 and worked to bring about judicial pay raises in 2006. Known for self-deprecating wit and clear, concise prose, Wolff wrote opinions that, among others, established the right to a jury trial in employment-discrimination cases and upheld the right to collective bargaining for public employees.

“The Supreme Court of Missouri is a terrific institution, and I very much enjoyed my time there,” he said. “I liked using words and writing, and this had a literary aspect to it.”

Wolff retired from the court in August 2011 and returned to SLU Law to teach. In 2013, after two previous deans left amid controversies, Wolff became dean, overseeing the law school’s move to its present location downtown. “I was the only guy standing around who looked like he needed something to do,” he joked.

Before stepping down as dean in 2017, Wolff was credited with helping to stabilize enrollment, increase alumni engagement and increase national rankings in such key metrics as bar passage and employment. At age 73, he still teaches, practices law, performs consulting work and serves as an advisor or board member with law-related and community organizations. Among his many professional honors: Missouri Lawyers Media’s Lawyer of the Year Award in 2007 and Influential Lawyer Award in 2014.

“I’m happy to be not in charge of things now,” he said. “Politics can be frustrating and exhilarating, and so is public service. At various points along the way, there’s a lot of it that can be painful, but you just keep going, and other things will be very rewarding. I think I enjoyed them all.”

— Cindi Lash

Michael A. Wolff

Dean Emeritus, Saint Louis University School of Law;

former Missouri Supreme Court Judge

ALARIS IS PROUD TO RECOGNIZE ICON AWARD HONOREESKenneth C. Brostron, Hon. Jon R. Gray, Hon. Brendan Ryan and Hon. Michael A. Wolff ON THE ALARIS ADR PANEL OF NEUTRALS.

Congratulations to all of the honorees for their dedication

and thoughtful leadership in the Missouri legal community.

alarisadr.usDeborah C. Weaver, CEO and Owner

314.754.7900 | [email protected] | 711 N. 11th Street, Saint Louis, MO 63101

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