Editorial
Front Page - Friday, February 19, 2010
Weill & Long law firm boasts a talented, flourishing history
Stephanie Coward
Ira Long and Flossie Weill, partners at Weill & Long PLLC. The law firm has a rich history of serving Chattanooga for 90 years.
- Stephanie Coward
The Weill & Long law firm has a rich history overflowing with lawyers who constantly used their education and professional knowledge to make the world both locally and globally, a better place.
Weill and Long began as a modest sized firm when T. Turley Rankin and Fred Frazier combined their talents and created Rankin & Frazier in 1914, housing themselves in offices on the 11th floor of the Volunteer Building. Prior to partnering with Rankin, Frazier had been in a partnership with another attorney. Rankin began practicing law in 1906 and was a member and shareholder of the Chattanooga Bar Association, which was established just nine years before. He also served as a member of the CBA’s grievance committee in 1909 and secretary-treasurer in 1911.
The two original founders had flourishing careers both within the firm’s walls and outside of them. Frazier served as Chattanooga Commissioner of Education for eight years, beginning in 1919; he also served as vice mayor. During his “progressive” tenure as commissioner, City High and Howard High were built and teachers’ salaries rose more than 65 percent. In 1939, he served as general counsel for the Chattanooga Federal Savings and Loan Association. Rankin served in the Roosevelt administration as lead counsel for Home Owners Loan Corporation; he also served – during World War II – as lead counsel for the War Assets Administration in the Truman administration.
During the ’20s, with a growing legal business, the partners knew they needed to bring in an associate, so they hired Joseph B. Roberts, who in just a few years made partner. When Rankin left to work in D.C. around the time the roaring ’20s were becoming the depression-era ’30s, the firm became Frazier & Roberts. Along with becoming a partner, Roberts also worked with the CBA, serving as its president in 1937. Membership that year was at 146, which was 115 people less than a decade before, a sure sign of the distressed times.
Roberts was admired and revered within the legal community, but always remained a hard worker. “I guess one thing I love now, is when I have an occasion to pull out an old law book, there’s not a case that doesn’t have his notes penciled in the margin,” said the firm’s current senior partner, Flossie Weill.
“But maybe one of the most interesting things about him is he attended the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tenn.” Ever the scholar, Roberts understood the trial’s significance and attended as a spectator.
As the ’30s ended, a local Chattanoogan was just graduating from Harvard Law and looking forward to helping out his community; upon his return home in 1940, Harry Weill was hired by Roberts. As was common then, Weill worked for a desk in the firm. “He wanted to get trial experience so he volunteered to represent people in criminal court,” Flossie said of her father. “In exchange for the right to use the desk, he would help the partners of the firm with work and then he would go out and develop some work on his own.
But Weill would put his work on hold mere months after he was hired, as World War II broke out and he enlisted. He first deployed as an intelligence officer and later became a bomber pilot – a position that was denied to him in the beginning due to vision impairment. He returned to the Scenic City in 1945 and jumped back into work. A year later, Weill, along with four other CBA members, wrote a report on an illicit divorce mill in Chattanooga – the report was distributed nationally. The CBA won the ABA’s Award of Merit that year, due in part to the writing of that report; this was the first time a Southern Bar won the award, according to Flossie.
Roberts became trustee of the city’s newly formed, McKenzie School Division of Law in 1946, and Weill was a teacher at the school until it closed in 1960.
A year after Rankin passed away, the firm dissolved its partnership, and with Frazier’s exit, Roberts & Weill was formed in 1955. Dixie T. Smith, who would later become a juvenile court judge, was hired as an associate at the newly formed firm.
The ’60s not only ushered in a new decade but a new associate as well. Walter Ellis joined the firm in 1960, and legend says he represented more people at any given time than anyone else in Chattanooga. “Walter Ellis would represent anyone who needed a lawyer,” Flossie said. “The lore says that he never turned anyone away.”
Just three years into the ’70s, Roberts died from a heart attack at age 84; he was still practicing law at that time. Roberts’ death brought forth the end of an era, as he and Weill had practiced law together for 33 years. “I believe it’s fair to say that he was my dad’s mentor,” Flossie said. But Roberts greatly impacted all those around him. “I have memories of being a young girl, and coming up to the office to see my dad, and Mr. Roberts would come out from around the corner from the big senior partner suite and come greet me and stick his hand out like I was the most important client.”
The firm then became Weill, Ellis, Weems & Copeland. Three and a half years later, the senior partner’s daughter, Flossie, would join the firm. She never planned to work at her dad’s firm, but became hooked while interning before graduation from UT College of Law. “I had worked here the summer before my last year of law school, begrudgingly, because my dad talked me into it. I ended up really, really enjoying it. It was just shocking. I never planned to join the firm,” Flossie said.
Three years later, she would make partner. “When I joined the firm in 1976, there was less than a handful of female attorneys practicing in Chattanooga … And that was an experience, because we were pioneers … Selma Paty broke the ceiling so to speak … She really blazed the trail and we followed in her footsteps.”
By the mid-1980s, the firm was using the entire 11th floor of the Volunteer Building. In 1988, at age 72, Weill became chairman of the CBA’s Memorial Committee – a position he held until he passed away 17 years later. “My dad was a robust character,” Flossie said.
The firm stayed Weill & Weill until 2003, when Ira Long – Flossie’s first cousin – joined as partner. Long, a Tulane Law graduate, had practiced in Denver before moving home. Two years later, in March 2005, after 85 years in the Volunteer Building, the firm moved to its current location in the Tullan Building. That same year, Harry Weill died at 88. He was still practicing law with, what was then, Weill, Durand and Long.
“He had tried a three- or four- day jury trial in April before he passed away in June, and just a few weeks before that trial, he was in Switzerland, skiing in the Alps,” according to his daughter. “That is a reflection of his vigor. He loved trying lawsuits. He loved being in the court and trying a case.”
The tremendousness was not lost on his nephew. “I learned an awful lot from him. … Harry did not get nervous. He didn’t have that reflex,” Long said.
Flossie received the CBA’s Albert L. Hodge Volunteer Award posthumously for her father. A year later, in 2006, the CBA established the Harry Weill Zealous Practice of Law Award, which is presented annually to, “a member of the Bar whose energetic and enthusiastic service to clients is worthy of praise, and whose polite and dignified manner, even in the most contentious situations, provides a model of civility that is worthy of emulation.”
Weill & Long was created in 2007. Both Flossie and Long have kept the firm’s flame of community involvement burning. Long served as president of the Chattanooga Trial Lawyers Association in 2006 and on the Chattanooga Bar’s Board of Governors in 2007. Also in 2007, Flossie began a two-year presidency of the Chattanooga chapter of American Inns of Court. During her tenure, the chapter received its first national recognition.
In 2009, Flossie was named a Fellow of the Chattanooga Bar Foundation. The foundation funds educational programs for its members and charitable community activities as well. Perhaps the firm has such a long, rich history because it has remained grounded in the essentials – the people it works for and the law. As Flossie’s secretary of almost 30 years, Brenda Walters, said, “Flossie is an extremely hard worker; she gives her clients more than 150 percent.”
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