We’re celebrating the Tennessee Bar Journal’s first 40 years all year! In each issue we will look back at an area of life in the law to see how the TBJ covered it. This month we examine how the Journal kept up with the Young Lawyers Divison. Students participating in the Tennessee State High School Mock Trial Competition were first pictured in the Journal in the ’80s — they’ve now had time to finish college, law school, a clerkship or two, join a firm, make partner.

The competition began in 1978 — run by the University of Tennessee’s Public Law Institute — but coverage in the Journal didn’t get serious until the competition had been taken over by the TBA Young Lawyers. In 1988, the state championships made the Journal’s cover, followed by repeat appearances in 1989, 1990 and 1993. (Was it only a coincidence that the young lawyers got its first staff member around that time, the same person who also produced the Journal?) There has been a story about the young lawyers’ flagship event every spring since then.

In 1993, the Tennessee Young Lawyers Conference (TYLC) changed its name to the current Young Lawyers Division (YLD).

Then-TYLC President Bill Haltom summed up the point of the mock trial in the May/June 1988 issue: “The mock trial teaches young people about how our system of justice works. If the students do become lawyers, they certainly would have a leg up. But any profession they go into, the mock trial experience will give them a greater respect and understanding for the law and lawyers.”

Seventeen years later, Haltom is still singing the praises of this program and others, as he prepares to take over as TBA president this June.

Haltom was correct that these students would have a leg up — just having met so many judges and seeing the process in action couldn’t hurt. In 1989, mock trial chair Mary LeMense told the students that they “would have argued this case before justices from the Tennessee Supreme Court, the Middle Section of the Court of Appeals, the Eastern Section of the Court of Appeals and the Court of Criminal Appeals. Very few attorneys have had the opportunity to argue cases in front of judges like these.”

What Do We Win?

Teams that win now receive a large silver bowl to keep and a traveling trophy that they retain until the next year’s competition. But back in the early days, impressive and expensive trophies were not part of the budget. In the March/April 1989 issue, mock trial chair LeMense explained: “When we began the competition about 10 years ago, we didn’t have the money to buy a nice trophy for the winners. So Allan Ramsaur, who is in Nashville now (as executive director of the Nashville Bar Association), went up to his attic and found this trophy that he had won in some sort of forensics competition in high school or college and gave it to us to use for the mock trial. Now we call it the Rammy. ”

Ramsaur, who was TYLC president in 1985-86 and is now the executive director of the Tennessee Bar Association, clarifies the trophy’s history: “I was ‘Member of the Year’ in my high school fraternity.”

The Rammy served the group well, but former YLD Director Betsy Hilt remembers that in the early ’90s “someone in the YLD had the gumption to ask Westlaw for funding to purchase a traveling trophy,” which Westlaw did.

Fat Elvis and Manslaughter

In 1997, the National High School Mock Trial Championship was held in Nashville. By this time, the YLD had a coordinator, Betsy Hilt, who organized the national meeting along with chair Wade Cowan, Linda Willis, Reese Willis, Karyn Bryant, Jackie Dixon, Rebecca Wells- Demaree, Todd Panther and Glenn Walter. The Tennessee Young Lawyers showed the rest of the country a little bit of Southern charm by having a “Fat Elvis” entertain at a reception. This was fitting since the case that year was about the fictional murder of Elvis.

Each year, a case is developed for the local and state contests by the mock trial chair. It seems no subject has been too hot or too controversial to cover. Topics of cases have been alcohol and drug abuse, teen suicide, mental illness, the rights of AIDS victims, arson of a religious cult’s property, hazing that resulted in involuntary manslaughter, Battered Woman’s Syndrome as a defense, the beating death of a 49-year-old man, and a science project that blew up in a student’s face.

Drug Abuse, Parolees and Other Projects

Coverage has not all been about the mock trial, though. In 1972, Richard P. McCully outlined the new drug abuse education program, an offshoot of a program done by the Columbia Bar Association for Law Day 1971. “A team consisting of a young lawyer and a medical doctor attend a pre-arranged school assembly and discuss the legal and medical consequences of drug abuse,” he wrote. “The intent of the program is to objectively lay out all of the facts, both legal and medical, to answer questions, and to let the students make their own evaluation with respect to their feelings about drugs.”

In 1974, James N. Bryan Jr. wrote about the need for volunteers to help with the National Volunteer Parole Aid Project, a local version of which was sponsored by the TYLC. “These volunteer projects offer every citizen the opportunity to extend the hand of friendship to an ex-offender and in so doing drastically reduce his chances of committing another offense.”

Training Ground for Future Leaders

The YLD, recognized as the bar’s public service arm, has been involved in a lot of projects, many of which the Journal has publicized. In 1990, a feature story, “The Award-winning Tennessee Young Lawyers Conference,” by Julie R. Gamble (now TBJ contributing writer Julie Swearingen) covered all the projects that were underway that year, many of them winners of national awards. That year the TYLC

• Produced the first Tennessee Ethics Handbook, which compiled Formal Ethics Opinions, the Code of Professional Responsibility and Tennessee’s Rules of Disciplinary Enforcement, all with extensive indexes.
• Produced a Court Directory listing the Circuit, Chancery and General Sessions Court clerks and judges of every county in the state. The Journal published a shortened, pullout reference in the July/August 1989 issue.
• Produced and distributed a divorce video, aimed at helping children at third grade level understand the process when needed; produced and distributed a DUI video to high school students.
• Produced a Local Rules pamphlet, The Quarterly newsletter, Bridge-the-Gap seminar, and carried out projects involving hunger relief, a community handbook regarding AIDS and the law, and a seminar for attorneys and physicians.

“Being a part of the TYLC is being a part of a dynamic and vital organization committed to service to both the public and the profession,” TYLC President Randy Noel said in that article. “This is an exciting time in the TYLC’s history.”

Noel, who later served as TBA president, wasn’t the only person touting the group. Then president Ronald Lee Gilman said, “The TYLC contributes the greatest amount of energy and effort to the bar association, especially in the area of public service, and the Young Lawyers Conference is certainly a training ground for future leaders of the Tennessee bar and the legal profession.”

That certainly was true in the case of Gilman, who was TYLC president in 1978-79. Today he is a judge on the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.

If funding is ever an issue and if the mock trial competition is in danger of extinction, those making the money decisions need only to flip back to the March/April 1989 Journal and read student Robert Edwards’ take on the experience: “At first I thought lawyers were just out for the money, but I don’t anymore.”

It’s hard to buy that kind of PR, folks.

—Suzanne Craig Robertson