Memories of a Counselor, on Tax and Many Other Matters

A quiet, iconic leader of the Georgia Tax and Estate Planning Bar died June 22 after a short illness. Following a prestigious clerkship with the revered Judge Elbert Tuttle, Hal began practice in the 1950s with Atlanta’s largest law firm at the time, Smith, Kilpatrick, Cody, Rogers & McClatchey. Hal understood that the “good old days” of law practice were only good if you were not African-American, female, Hispanic, Jewish, gay or in other groups whose access to the profession and law firms was limited. He was instrumental in building the firm from 14 lawyers in Atlanta to more than 600 lawyers, with 18 offices across the United States, Europe and Asia. Hal’s modesty and selflessness did not conceal the attributes people most frequently use to describe him—”caring and brilliant.” These qualities engendered loyalty and reliance on his judgment and advice by community leaders, entrepreneurs and philanthropists from all walks of life who, with colleagues and family, filled The Temple at the memorial service to pay their respects, notwithstanding that his obituary only appeared that morning.

Hal’s early career as a Renaissance lawyer was unknown to most but served as the foundation for establishing his depth outside the field of tax and estate planning for which he was best known. The range of problems that he dealt with as a young lawyer included, by way of example: prevailing at a hearing in a packed Upson County courtroom that compelled a judge to permit a liquor referendum on the ballot; working to document and halt discrimination by one of Georgia’s leading resorts under the Civil Rights Act in 1964; challenging the revocation of a federal parole without a hearing and prevailing on behalf of the parolee on a legal theory sustained by the U.S. Supreme Court; winning product liability child death and serious personal injury cases; and coordinating the appellate brief following a multimillion dollar judgment in Butts v. Curtis Publishing, where the tax law was used advantageously to settle the case for a fraction of the judgment based upon the ability at that time to convert taxable punitive damages into a much smaller, nontaxable recovery.