The road map for many attorneys looks like this: go to law school; clerk for one year; spend the next 50 years working days, nights and weekends; and then retire. Step three commonly involves a host of ancillary activities, such as becoming an active member of a local bar association, volunteering additional time in the community, and so on. While there are rewards for taking such an approach, lawyers must count the cost.
Attorney Beverly Edge has taken a slightly different path.
A native of Ringgold, Ga., Edge worked for criminal defense attorney McCracken Poston while in high school and college. She earned an undergraduate degree in accounting at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, not because she wanted to be a CPA, but because she thought a business degree would give her something on which to fall back if being a lawyer didn’t work out. Edge then earned her law degree at the University of Georgia, and upon graduation, spent one year clerking for the judges of the Lookout Mountain circuit.
The cases on which Poston had worked intrigued Edge, so she thought she would enjoy doing the same kind of work on her own. With this in mind, she opened a criminal defense and domestic law practice in Ringgold in 1999. While Edge enjoyed the freedom of having her own practice, she didn’t enjoy the work.
“Law school doesn’t teach you how to be a lawyer, so I don’t think anyone truly knows what they want to do until they get out and try a few things,” Edge says. Instead of turning to accounting, Edge decided to take her law career in a different direction by combining it with her interest in business. Gearhiser, Peters, Cavett, Elliott & Cannon snatched her before anyone else could and put her to work as a transactional attorney.
Throughout her 10 years with the firm, Edge has handled a variety of transactions, including acquisitions, sales, mergers, and succession planning for businesses ranging in size from “mom and pop” operations to national corporations. She regularly works with individuals on starting new businesses, and frequently advises business owners and executives on business strategy, planning and compensation.
Edge’s work involves all aspects of business operations and transactions; as a result, she has substantial experience in selecting the preferred business entity for new ventures, and in the formation of such entities, including limited liability companies, S corporations, limited partnerships, family partnerships and general partnerships.
Poston says Edge was “a great catch” for Gearhiser.
“Beverly has an incredible mind, and the work she’s doing for Gearhiser suits her personality. It was a good move for her.” Edge says the thing she enjoys most about her work is taking a project from start to finish.
“I like taking a client who wants to get into a certain business through the process, from investigating the business, to negotiating the deal, to going through the actual transaction,” she says. Edge does miss one thing from her days of doing criminal defense work: the contact she had with other lawyers.
“Most of the things on which I work either don’t in-volve another attorney because I’m simply helping a client with something, or the attorney is in another state, so we email and talk on the phone, and then the closing happens long distance,” she says.
Edge and her husband, Chris, live in Ringgold, with their two sons, Henley and Carter. While she decided early in her career that her family would be her top priority, in 2004, something happened that solidified her resolve to miss the fewest possible nights and weekends with her husband and children: she was diagnosed with breast cancer. “I didn’t have the normal kind of breast cancer; I had an adenoid cystic carcinoma that happened to be in my breast. Instead of having chemotherapy or radiation, I had a mastectomy,” Edge says.
Edge says what she experienced was more difficult emotionally than physically because of her sons, who were three and five years old at the time. As a coping mechanism, Edge returned to work the week following her surgery.
“I was bound and determined to return life to normal as soon as possible. I laugh about that decision now,” she says. Since her experience with breast cancer, Edge has emphasized her family over many of the things on which attorneys concentrate at the same point in their careers.
While she has served as a trustee at Ringgold United Methodist Church, where she and her husband are members, and on the Brainerd Baptist School Board, the majority of her time away from work in spent cheering for her sons at their sports activities.
“If I’m not in the office, I’m watching a baseball or basketball game,” she says. Given the balance Edge has decided to strike between work and family, she says she’s with the perfect firm. “Almost half of the attorneys here are women, and there have been times when it’s been more than half. So, we’re a family-friendly firm. We think it’s important to have a good balance between home and the office. It’s one of the reasons I chose to work here.
“There are times when I have to make an exception. For example, Christmas is always busy because people are trying to close their transactions before the end of the year for tax purposes.” The only other place people are likely to see Edge is in her yard, working. It’s her way of relieving stress.
Edge might be working off a different road map than some of her peers, but she’s no less successful. She’s handling a full load at an esteemed firm, she’s earned the respect of peers, and when she leaves the office, she has a family at home looking forward to seeing her. She’s counted the cost, and she’s still coming out ahead.