Attorney Misty Harris can recall the first time she participated in a cross-examination.
She wasn’t a lawyer yet. In fact, she hadn’t even started high school. Rather, she was a 12-year-old girl sitting in a witness seat and answering questions.
Harris’ father and mother were locked in a bitter custody dispute that had stretched painfully across several years.
She can remember the smell of the courtroom and the hideous green suit her mother’s attorney wore. (This was the ‘70s.) She can also recall her parents looking uncomfortable as they sat together at the counsel table.
“My mom’s attorney would cross-examine me, and my then dad’s attorney would cross-examine me,” she says. “I also had to talk with the judge several times, and there was family counseling. It was constant.”
Today, Harris practices family law, which places her back in court to advocate for clients in divorces, custody matters, child support hearings, adoptions, terminations of parental rights and more. She also occasionally serves as guardian ad litem for children (a service she was not afforded as a child).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Harris can trace the roots of her interest in the law back to her adverse experiences as a child.
“I believe I became interested in the law because I was in court all the time,” she says. “I know it sounds contrived, but maybe my desire to fix the world and fix my own stuff is part of why I do what I do.”
Although Harris spent nearly her entire youth embroiled in this conflict, good things come to mind when she recalls the experience. She spent her first few years living with her grandparents on their working farm in Maynardville, where she grew up with chickens and pigs. (She can remember the smell there, too.)
Harris continued to spend time at the farm after she moved in with her father in Knoxville suburb, giving her a diverse mix of influences. These can be seen today in the East Main Street building she and her husband, Trey Harris, built for their practice, as well as in the chickens they keep on their property in Walden.
“We have some room there, so we have chickens,” she says unironically. “We have six fancy chickens.”
Harris says she also benefited from the presence of several strong women, including her grandmother, with whom she was very close, the woman who later married her father, a great aunt and more.
Through this passageway of people and experiences, Harris emerged into adulthood with two keen interests: anthropology and the law.
“People fascinate me,” she says regarding her attraction to the former. “I wonder what motivates them – what makes them tick.”
Harris nursed both interests while in college. In addition to majoring in anthropology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, she worked for a local law firm, where she served as a receptionist, runner, paralegal and copy machine mechanic.
“I did it all. And I met some cool lawyers in a fast-paced environment. They were fun to watch and be around,” she recalls.
Harris says her time at the firm reinforced her interest in the law, as did the deputy clerk job she held for several years at the Tennessee Court of Appeals.
She met Trey while working at the court and remembers reading the files on “the crazy custody cases and horrible murders in Hamilton County.”
Despite what Harris had learned about Hamilton County, she didn’t blink when Trey secured a job in Chattanooga in 1999 and they moved to the city to begin the next chapter of their life together.
Rather, she continued to deepen her connections to the law, serving first as a recruiting coordinator at Baker Donelson and then commuting to law school in Memphis, not just to “fix the world and [her] ... own stuff” but also because she liked the law.
In 2004, Harris graduated from law school and returned to Chattanooga, where she worked as an associate with two firms before Juvenile Court Judge Suzanne Bailey tapped her to serve as a magistrate in 2008.
After sitting on the bench for three years, Harris worked of counsel at Lawrence & Lawrence. She and her husband then built their East Main building in 2018 and launched Harris Law.
They’re still there today, working alongside various life-sized ghouls and goblins, which they have stood by their streetside windows for Halloween.
The childhood memories that lurk on the edges of Harris’ subconscious are with her all year, though, and tend to color her interactions with people who find themselves entangled in conflict and relying on the legal system to untie them.
“When I mediate, I ask how everyone grew up. ‘Were your parents married? Were they happy?’ You can minimize the effects of adverse childhood experiences, so I remind people to tread cautiously because kids remember everything.”
Harris has reached beyond her practice to also serve people and organizations in her community.
In addition to sitting on a board at the Department of Children’s Services that encouraged absent fathers to take a role in the lives of their children, she contributed her legal know-how to the effort at Partnership for Families, Children and Adults to launch a supervised visitation facility.
Also, she and her husband have volunteered at various legal clinics, helping people who could not afford an attorney.
Harris’ peers in the legal community were watching, and over the last year, have awarded her with what she jokingly calls the Triple Crown of the local bar: The Chattanooga Bar Association’s Harry Weill Zealous Practice of Law Award, the Brock-Cooper Inns of Court’s Civility Award and an invitation to become a fellow of the CBA.
“I feel like they’re getting ready to put me out to pasture,” she smirks. “I just turned 48, and I’m wondering what everyone knows that I don’t.”
Kidding aside, Harris says she feels honored because the awards place her in the company of attorneys and judges for whom she has tremendous respect, but also sheepish because she wonders if she belongs there.
Some people have suggested there’s irony in receiving awards for zealous representation and civility in the same year. To Harris, however, the two go hand in hand.
“I don’t think stomping around and raising my voice is necessarily zealous. In many ways, you can be more effective by being a quiet but dogged presence in a courtroom.
“That’s not always easy. Sometimes, being zealous for a client means I might have take a position that might not be best for a child, and I sometimes have a hard time with those cases.
“But I do feel like I can do a lot of good when I use my powers wisely.”
There have been times, Harris confesses, when she did not use her powers wisely. She says these cases were the ones that taught her the most about how to practice the law effectively.
Perhaps because of her previous missteps, there are times when a case won’t let her sleep.
“I was up last night worrying about a child. There are issues that have to be timed just right to make sure this child is protected.
“And was I worried when I was on the bench. For a while, I would wake up in the morning and check the newspaper to make sure none of the parents [to whom] I had awarded custody had been arrested.”
Outside of the courtroom, Harris finds enjoyment in simple activities that also have their roots in her childhood. On the same property where she tends chickens, she enjoys growing vegetables, plants and anything else she can coax out of Walden’s soil.
“That came from the farm,” she admits. “After I’ve been in my head all day thinking and writing, it’s nice to do something with my hands.
“I also like the immediate gratification of seeing the work I’ve done. Sometimes with my practice, I don’t have immediate gratification. Sometimes I do; I do a lot of custody work, where grandparents are pulling neglected children out of bad situations. But I might not ever see anything good come out of a lot of what I do.”
There are no children living on this patch of land. Harris and her husband tried for years to start a family, but it never happened.
One can imagine this was disappointing to both of them, but like Harris is prone to do, she avoids being mawkish and instead finds a way to smooth the edges.
“You don’t always get what you want,” she says, paraphrasing the Rolling Stones, “but you do get what you need.”
The custody battle that consumed a decade of Harris’ young life ended when the judge allowed her choose where she wanted to live. (She chose her father.) Although stressful, the experience placed her on a path to a place where she now advocates for others who are caught up in similar circumstances.
Perhaps this, as much as anything else in her life, reveals just how true those lyrics are.