Editorial
Front Page - Friday, May 14, 2010
Real estate attorney enjoys front seat to city renewal
David Laprad
Real estate attorney Paul Hatcher represents a variety of clients through his law practice and provides real estate title and escrow services. Much of the work he’s done has been rehabilitative in nature.
- David Laprad
When most people drive through the town in which they live, they pass by the places where they eat, shop, work and relax. When real estate attorney Paul Hatcher drives through his hometown of Chattanooga, he sees the businesses and homes he had a hand in putting in place.
“It’s fairly often, when my wife and I are driving around, that I’ll point at something and tell her I did the closing there,” he says.
Hatcher often does this with pride, as a good portion of the real estate work in which he’s been involved has been rehabilitative. Even the building in which he now practices law was once an eyesore; now it’s part of an attractive strip of retail and office space at the intersection of McCallie Avenue and Highland Park.
“This building had been mothballed for over 20 years when I bought it, gutted it, put in the parking lot and did the landscaping,” he says of the structure in which his firm now resides. His tenants include Aunt Sue’s K-9 Bakery and Pet Supplies, Pilates of Chattanooga and Genos Salon. He has one other space he hopes to lease to a restaurant, as his renters need the foot traffic.
While Hatcher has had a front seat to the revitalization of Chattanooga, his personal mission for the last decade has been the Highland Park area, which he’s seen go from “crack houses and street walkers” to single family residences selling for $250,000.
Hatcher might not have poured the concrete and set the girders in place, but his clients did depend on him to take care of their business and litigation needs. And they continue to do so today.
“I still do a lot of commercial litigation, which means I spend a lot of time in Chancery Court dealing with contractual issues,” he says. “A lot of problems are showing themselves because companies are more involved in enforcement than making deals (due to the condition of the economy). For example, I had a mortgage that had been recorded, closed and notarized, but not signed.”
Hatcher represents a variety of clients, including lenders, real estate companies, construction businesses, corporations, developers, investors and individuals. This has given him the opportunity to broaden his practice to include services that fall outside the domain of real estate law. “You don’t want to send a client down the street to form an LLC because you might not ever see him again,” he says.
In addition to his law practice, Hatcher provides real estate title and escrow services under the same roof.
Hatcher began charting a course in real estate almost as soon as he was studying the law. A graduate of Red Bank High School, he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and then attended the College of Law at UT Knoxville. When he wasn’t in class, Hatcher worked for a firm that did real estate work, so he found himself handling closings as a student. Although he also did criminal work and divorces, he gravitated toward business law and real estate.
A little over a year after Hatcher graduated, Provident recruited him to work at a subsidiary engaged in pension fund work.
“They were getting large quantities of money and were having to invest it,” he says. “I was one of three attorneys involved in closing the deals. In 1987, we closed a half billion dollars in mortgage funds. That was a lot more zeroes than I was accustomed to seeing.”
The workload might have had an effect on Hatcher, who after six years left Provident to start his own practice.
“I was wondering if I had six years of commercial estate experience or three years of experience twice,” he says. “I got restless and started wondering what else was out there.”
Hatcher opened his own office in 1989 and was its sole practitioner for 12 years. He then joined forces with attorney Stuart Duncan, who was a tremendous help to Hatcher while he was working alone. “It was a wonderful merger. Stuart and I were great law partners,” Hatcher says.
When Duncan died of cancer in 2006, Hatcher added Everett Hixson to the firm, forming what’s now Duncan, Hatcher & Hixson. Having worked through the period of transition that followed the death of his partner, Hatcher says practicing law is fun again.
While Hatcher might come across as a button-down business type, that’s only part of who he is. To form a complete picture, one would have to take into account Hatcher’s roles as husband, father, musician, writer and volunteer.
Hatcher and his wife, Bambi, have been married for 24 years and have five children, including a son and a daughter who are on their own, two college-age daughters and a daughter who’s a freshman at CSAS. He perks up when he talks about his kids, discussing each one’s job or career goals in detail and reminiscing about their accomplishments in school.
As well as being a family man, Hatcher is a trained musician who spent the ‘90s performing in a band that opened for several well-known acts, including the Atlanta Rhythm Section. The band also played Riverside, Nightfall and the 1996 Olympics, did long weekends in New Orleans and played the club and corporate circuits in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama.
A drummer, pianist and keys player, Hatcher still sits in with his former band mates from time to time, although his primary musical outlet today is a 16-track recording studio in his basement.
Hatcher also occasionally flexes the writing muscles he developed as an undergraduate. His portfolio includes articles published in WWII History magazine and the fourth chapter of “The World War II Desk Reference,” which Harper Collins published in 2005. His portion of the book contained a nation-by-nation survey of the war experience of each major and many minor participants in the conflict.
In addition, Hatcher sits on the board of directors of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Speech and Hearing Center, a non-profit organization that provides care and services to the speech and hearing impaired. He’s also on the board of St. Andrews Center, a non-denominational organization dedicated to the civic development of Chattanooga’s inner city and its residents.
And when Hatcher has the time, he and his wife enjoy hiking and traveling by boat and train.
While his interests outside of work are diverse, Hatcher can’t imagine himself doing something other than practicing real estate law for a living.
“I don’t know what else I would’ve done,” he says. “It’s what I like to get up in the morning and do.”
|
|