Jerry Summers will tell you he’s “not as arrogant and obnoxious as some people think,” and then prove it with stories – about missing the last shot in a state basketball tournament, turning down an offer to play for the New York Mets or losing his UT law scholarship.
That current of humility runs under his firm’s latest gift to his alma mater – a $1 million pledge from Summers, Rufolo & Rodgers to support scholarships at the University of Tennessee’s Winston College of Law.
The law school framed it as a continuation of the Chattanooga firm’s “significant investment” in advocacy and in students who want to serve the public good.
Summers frames it differently. He says it’s what you do when you remember how many people hauled you forward.
“It started with Central High,” he says. “People there helped me get to Auburn for a year, then others stepped in to get me to Sewanee. Somebody was always helping me.”
Summers says this in the same way he talks about everything else – like each stop in his life could have been a full chapter.
From Central to UT
Summers’ path to UT Law was anything but straight. A zealous athlete, he went from Central High to Auburn on a baseball scholarship for a year before finding his way to Sewanee: The University of the South. There, he worked multiple jobs to stay in school and built the academic record that nudged UT to let him into law school.
Sewanee ended up being a hinge in Summers’ life for another reason: it showed him what was possible when people opened a door.
“Sewanee’s reputation got me into law school, which I chose instead of signing a baseball contract with the New York Mets,” he says.
The Mets were a new franchise and were signing players to fill out their low-level clubs. A scout approached Summers at a tournament at Washington & Lee, where he’d gotten hot. The offer was $500 to sign and, as he remembers it, $500 a month for June, July and August.
That’s the sliding-doors moment in Summers’ story. One way led to baseball, the other led to UT. Summers had already had shoulder surgery – the result of playing safety at Central at 155 pounds and trying to bring down a 190-pound running back from Memphis South Side – so the baseball road was going to be steep.
He sat down with legendary Chattanooga attorney John K. Morgan and laid out his options: pro baseball, an insurance job in Chattanooga or law school.
“After process of elimination,” Summers says, “law school was the lesser of all evils.”
A law school that kept mattering
The gift UT Law announced Oct. 23 isn’t the firm’s first. The practice has a long history of supporting the school, especially the advocacy program. Summers helped found what is now the law school’s Center for Advocacy and Dispute Resolution and has been a member of the dean’s circle for years.
Summers said his support has always focused on helping students who plan to become trial lawyers.
“What little money I’ve given, I’ve directed to scholarships for people who want to be in the courtroom,” he says.
That focus continues with this latest $1 million pledge, which is designated for students pursuing advocacy and for two existing scholarship programs: the Douglas A. Blaze Leadership Scholarship and the John K. Morgan Scholarship.
There’s a loyalty streak in that. Summers still calls it “UT Law,” even though it’s now the Winston College of Law. What matters to him is that it was the place that said yes to a young man who had already burned through an athletic scholarship, lost a scholarship once he arrived in Knoxville and still wanted to be a lawyer.
Summers said he continues to give for two reasons.
First, because people helped him. That’s the theme of his book “The Turtle and the Lawyer,” which he describes as a series of thank-yous. He still keeps a mental list of people who pulled him forward – high school coaches and people at Sewanee and UT and in Chattanooga – and the gifts are his way of passing on what they did for him to others.
Second, because he wants the firm to outlast him.
Summers is 84 “and a half,” as he puts it. He’s spent decades doing everything in the name of the firm because he wants to “take care of the lawyers who are going to follow” him. Two of those lawyers, Jeffrey Rufolo (UT ’91) and Jimmy Rodgers (UT ’94), have been with him more than 30 years. Attorney Marya Schalk (UT ’05) has been with him close to two decades. Attorney Benjamin McGowan has been with the firm about 15 years. He describes that kind of loyalty as rare and something he wants to feed.
That’s why every major gift to the law school is made in the firm’s name, not his.
“Each one of the gifts we’ve given to the law school has been designated a spokesperson,” he says, meaning he pushes his younger partners into the spotlight.
McGowan, who spoke for the firm in the UT release, said, “I’m not a Winston Law graduate, but the lawyers with whom I work are a daily reminder of the quality of the school’s high standards.”
That’s Summers’ line of thinking, too. Keeping the pipeline to Knoxville healthy will keep the practice of law in Chattanooga healthy.
A self-deprecating advocate
If you spend an hour with Summers, his reputation comes up before you can raise it.
“You’ve heard a few good things and a lot of bad things about me,” he says.
Then he shrugs it off.
“Some people think I’m the most wonderful thing since peanut butter. Some people think I’m overrated. That’s life.”
He has, by his own account, taken on clients other lawyers wouldn’t touch. He’s defended notorious defendants because he believes “everybody is entitled to be represented.”
That stance, along with his outspoken distaste for the flood of TV lawyer ads, has made him a target at times. He knows that. He also knows that the things for which UT honored him – his trial work, his Supreme Court appearances and his role in building an advocacy program – sprang from that same instinct to do the right thing.
That’s the version of Summers this latest gift reveals: not the shrewd trial lawyer but the kid from Central who figured out that gratitude has to go somewhere.
Why it matters
For UT Winston College of Law, the timing couldn’t be better. The school is in the middle of cementing its brand around advocacy and leadership, and the scholarships Summers’ firm is backing – those aimed at students who want to be in the courtroom – are precisely what make a regional law school attractive to first-generation or working-class Tennesseans who need a hand.
For Chattanooga, the gift is another marker of how deeply rooted Summers, Rufolo & Rodgers is in the city’s legal culture. The firm turns 56 this year, having been founded in 1969 by Summers, and it has made a habit of punching above its weight, whether in asbestos litigation, criminal defense or civic projects like the recent blood donation competition for Hamilton County schools. The UT gift fits that pattern: do something useful, attach the firm’s name to it and let the next generation carry it.
“It’s my way of saying thank you,” Summers says. “And maybe of saying, ‘I didn’t forget.’”