As litigation attorney Lacey Rorex is preparing for a trial, she asks herself an exhaustive list of questions to ensure she’s in fighting shape.
“Is my paralegal ready? Is my firm ready? Is my family ready?” she’ll begin as she checks the integrity of her foundation.
Rorex then turns her diagnostic gaze on herself and asks if she’s personally equipped to tackle the challenges that lie ahead.
“Where am I mentally?” she’ll continue. “Am I working out? Am I alleviating stress?”
“I make sure I’m ready,” Rorex, 32, explains.
Rorex’s pre-trial assessment prepares her for the moment she’ll step into the space she says she was born to inhabit – the courtroom – and tear into her opposition with the teeth and claws of a young lioness of the bar.
Her eyes narrow as she describes how she pulled to bits the defense of a pickup driver that had plowed into the rear of the vehicle her elderly client in a case had been driving.
“This was no fender-bender; my client’s trunk was in his back seat,” Rorex says of the car-crunching collision.
Rorex’s client had braked at a crosswalk on Dayton Boulevard in Red Bank to allow pedestrians to pass. The road had just cleared when the accident occurred and seriously injured her client.
The trucker’s defense had Rorex fuming.
“He wanted to blame the pedestrians,” she recalls, shaking her head with fresh disbelief. “I said, ‘Is he crazy? They weren’t jaywalking; they were using a crosswalk.’”
The trial to resolve the case was slated to begin six days before a pregnant Rorex was due to give birth for the first time. However, she says her concerns about her client’s age and injuries, as well as her firm belief that she’d win, kept her from changing the date.
Rorex’s husband, Matthew, wanted her to reconsider, but she’d already completed her pre-trial checklist and believed was ready to dismantle what she says was a contemptible defense.
“I couldn’t allow the defendant to try to take the blame off of himself and place it on someone who wouldn’t have been there to speak for themselves. That felt really, really wrong.”
Thankfully, Rorex continues, an eleventh-hour stunner brought the case to an end.
“The defense counsel called and offered what we were expecting the jury would give us. And my client said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
While the parties stopped short of going to court, Rorex had been prepared to cross that threshold since the moment she’d taken on the cause of her battered client. This is true of every case she accepts as part of the roster at Massey & Associates, a Chattanooga-based personal injury firm, she notes.
“Every case we take on is trial-worthy. We don’t approach any client from the standpoint of getting them in, settling and getting them out. Someone has done something wrong, and in order to get our client what they deserve and make our community safer, we have to make the defendant answer for what they’ve done.”
Taking a case to court is generally the only way to achieve these often-grueling objectives, Rorex continues. It’s also a risky proposition, she adds.
“Every case comes with a measure of risk, which is a conversation we have with every client before we take their matter to trial. We never tell a client their case is a winner because we don’t know what the jury will do. The outcome won’t be up to me, the judge or the defendant; it’ll be up to a jury. It’ll be up to people like you and me.”
Rorex winces as she calls to mind a case in which the jury skewered her expectations for the outcome like meat on a kabob.
“This one keeps me up at night trying to figure out ways I could have fixed what happened,” she frowns.
The facts seemed to favor Rorex’s client, a young woman who’d been in the last of several vehicles struck in a chain collision at the Amnicola exit from Highway 153 after a driver approaching stop-and-go traffic slammed into the back of a stopped vehicle.
The force of the initial impact rippled through the procession of vehicles and hit the car in which Rorex’s client was a passenger with violent force. The blow flung the woman, who hit her head on a hard surface.
Rorex’s client caught not only a severe case of whiplash but also tinnitus, which can be a symptom of an injury to a person’s auditory system. Evidence of the condition can include hearing noises, such as ringing or buzzing, when there’s no outside source.
The tinnitus was a blade that cut more than once, as not only did the treating physician suggest it could be permanent, but the woman was a singer, and the sounds she was hearing were affecting her pitch, Rorex contended.
Although Rorex presented expert medical testimony, she says the jury didn’t respond to the doctor.
“They believed he had a financial incentive for testifying.”
In spite of the potential for juries to throw curve balls, Rorex places her confidence in the ability of the American legal process to mete out justice above her disappointment with the outcome of any one matter. And the best way to achieve justice, she says, is through a jury.
“No one cares more about what goes on in a community than the people who live in it. And when something goes wrong, your neighbors are the ones who will hold you accountable. The power of a jury makes a community safer.”
A house divided
Many attorneys can trace their interest in the law and advocacy to a specific influence, whether it was a family member who was a jurist, a college class that kindled their intellect, or a legal drama such as “Perry Mason,” to cite a few possibilities.
Rorex falls into the latter camp, although her TV star was not a fictional soldier of justice but a flesh-and-blood former prosecutor who wields the law – and some say her tongue – like a sharpened sword: legal commentator Nancy Grace.
“I wanted to become a lawyer because of Nancy Grace,” Rorex remembers. “She approached crimes from the position of the law. She’d take the facts available at the time, apply the law and arrive at a conclusion. Sometimes, she’d say the prosecutor didn’t have enough evidence to secure a conviction.
“That interested me. Even in high school, I believed I could trust what she said. She was able to speak like she did because of her education and experience as a lawyer.”
Grace captivated Rorex with stories of murders and other crimes committed on a geographical canvas that was much larger than that of her hometown of Snellville, Georgia, a city so small, its tallest building was a church, Rorex quips.
“When you drive into Snellville, the sign says, “Welcome to Snellville, where everybody’s somebody.’ That’s because everybody knows everybody.”
Rorex spent her childhood cheerleading, playing softball and basketball, and feeling secure in the embrace of her family, which has deep generational roots in the community.
“Some of my elementary school teachers were my parents’ teachers. My great-grandfather, who will be 95 this year, has lived in the same house for nearly that long. Nobody leaves Snellville. But it was safe; I didn’t even think about bad things happening.”
Families that are tied to a plot of land might cling to certain traditions as well. Such was true of Rorex’s family members, many of whom attended the University of Georgia and more of which are dyed-in-wool Bulldogs fans.
As Rorex approached the end of high school, she intended to follow in the footsteps of her mother, as well as an aunt and an uncle, and attend UGA. She’d applied, been accepted and even made sure the college had a well-regarded law school, so her future was beginning to crystallize.
Then a fellow classmate started shooting off her mouth about being accepted at Auburn.
“Auburn and Georgia have one of the oldest rivalries in the South. I disliked Auburn, so I said, ‘Big deal; anyone can get in there.’ But she wouldn’t shut up, so I decided to apply and tell her I was accepted.”
Then an unexpected thing happened as Rorex and her fellow student swapped barbs: Auburn not only accepted Rorex but also offered her a generous academic scholarship.
Rorex was still weighing her options for college as she and her mother pulled onto the Auburn campus to take a tour. However, the moment she saw the school’s crimson and green sprawl of historic brick buildings and ancient oaks, she was sold.
“We were still in the car when I said, ‘Mom, I’m going to Auburn.’ When I told my dad, he said, ‘If that’s what you want to do, great, but don’t expect me to hop on the bandwagon.’”
Evidence of Grace
If Rorex was eager to become a lawyer before attending Auburn, she was champing at the bit after finishing its prelaw program, including the mock trial course she was required to complete. As she played the role of an attorney in the final exam, she came to see the courtroom as her only destination, she says.
“It went back to why Nancy Grace intrigued me. I was applying the law to the facts and holding someone accountable for what they’d done.”
After graduating from Belmont University’s College of Law in 2019, the first job Rorex landed slapped her dewy-eyed idealism with the icy waters of reality. As an attorney with the state of Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services, she prosecuted child support cases, which placed her in front of a judge three days a week. While this gave her valuable courtroom experience, it also put her in charge of heart-wrenching matters.
“Many of the parents who struggle with substance abuse want to do the right thing, and all the human parts of you want to give them a chance, but when you apply the facts to the law, there’s often nothing you can do to assure the court that the child in question is going to be in a safe home.”
Rorex even bore witness to the day a teenage mother and father entered the courtroom with their week-old infant and said they wanted to give up the baby for adoption. While trying cases in this environment was distressing, Rorex says it was a critical part of her development as an attorney.
“It’s easy to become attached to your clients and make their struggles yours. Lawyers can relate to others, and most of us have empathy, but it taught me to express my care for people through advocacy. In order to build the best case I can, I have to keep my clients’ emotions out of it. Their pain and suffering might not be relevant to the facts.”
Learning to separate the practice of law from being human while handling cases involving embattled children wasn’t easy for Rorex, who’d flourished in the arms of a nurturing family. But the lesson took hold and, in the end, she emerged from her test of fire less naive but with her idealism intact.
And then she found an employer who knew how to wield it.
A Massey associate
After Rorex and her husband moved to Chattanooga in 2021, he asked her if she was going to do the same kind of work. Hearing concern in his voice, she agreed it was time to find a different area of practice.
Rorex’s thoughts returned to when she clerked for Hughes & Coleman during law school. Her work for the firm had involved researching slip-and-falls and car wrecks for its attorneys, and she believed her experiences there would give her a head start on learning the ins and outs of personal injury work.
Plus, she still wanted to be in the courtroom, Rorex says. While her stint with DCS had been upsetting at times, it hadn’t diminished her desire to try cases.
When Rorex learned that Gary Massey, the founding attorney of Massey & Associates, was looking to add an attorney to his staff, she tossed her hat into the ring.
During the interview, Massey explained that his firm doesn’t settle cases to avoid the headaches a trial could bring; rather, they zealously march cases to court. Rorex’s response was succinct but also said volumes:
“Perfect.”
Three years after her interview with Massey and a multitude of trials, Rorex says she loves the courtroom more than she ever has.
“You can’t be an attorney here and be afraid of the courtroom. I was born to be here, and outside of being a wife and a mom, my work at this firm is my highest priority.”
When there’s no trial looming on her calendar, Rorex is able to spend evenings and weekends with her family.
Whether she’s kayaking with her husband, cheering on her 12-year-old stepson at a football game or chasing her 2-year-old daughter through their Ooltewah home, she makes the most of this time, she says.
Even as Rorex cherishes these moments, she knows her commitment to pursuing justice in courts of law will eventually pull her away from her loved ones, she adds. This will be the case in February as she retries the case of the woman with tinnitus.
The judge in the original hearing declared a mistrial due to juror misconduct, so Rorex will have a chance to “fix what happened” and hopefully begin to sleep better at night.
As the date for the retrial approaches, Rorex will ask herself an exhaustive list of questions to ensure she’s in fighting shape. The last query will be the one to which all the others point, and will require untold hours of work for her to be able to answer favorably:
“Am I ready?”