The Ray family tree is laden with seven generations of fruitful attorney ancestry. Now, two generations have combined at Harry B. Ray and Associates, PLLC: Harry B. Ray and his son, Scott Ray.
In the seven generations of attorneys the Ray family has produced, this is the first time a father and son duo has teamed up to go into practice together. Talking to Harry B. Ray about his son’s first day at the firm, it’s obvious to see he is excited about their partnership and what type of fruit will develop from this endeavor on Scott’s branch of the family tree.
Harry B. Ray was born in Stuttgart, Germany and lived there six months while his father was in the service until the family moved back to Atlanta. Ray grew up in Atlanta and went to North Georgia College. He became a cadet and went through the military program there, went into the army for two years and then attended Emory University School of Law on the GI Bill.
Ray says even with the long line of lawyers in his blood, the ascent to his career choice was a gradual process. Besides the lawyers on both his mother and father’s sides he could model himself after, he also had an ancestor who was a congressman in Georgia, E.W. Chastain. At Emory, Ray thought he would grow up to be a tax lawyer. The first firm he joined when he came to Chattanooga was Stophel, Caldwell & Heggie, where he learned a lot of tax background. Ray’s change to a different area of practice, he jokingly blames on Ronald Reagan, for simplifying the tax act.
“It just wasn’t as much fun to be a tax lawyer after he became president and made things so simple. I still say that jokingly because the tax act isn’t all that simple, but the tax rates were a lot lower,” Ray says. He moved into mergers and acquisitions in 1986, when John Stophel gave him a buying and marketing group client where Ray learned how to cut their marketing expenses. This led to the career path – he has been on ever since in buying and marketing group work for 25 years. Cases of this nature involve all sorts of areas of law, Ray says. One common area is anti-trust, because there are people in the same industry and competitors coming together, which makes anti-trust agencies nervous, he says. Because of this, they need to have good legal counsel like Ray to keep them straight and out of trouble.
On the marketing side, Ray has gotten into trademark work quite a bit. He also does general contracts involving the rights between members in the group, rights between vendors, and rights of those who sell to the group. There’s also some product liability law involved, too, because sometimes the groups will get sued because of products that the members sell, he says.
After Stophel, Caldwell & Heggie split in 1986, Ray went with the Stophel side. He then joined the Grant Konvalinka firm in 1996, and his career took an even bigger turn when he went to work at Husch Blackwell, a firm of about 230 then, that grew to 600 when Ray made the change to Harry B. Ray and Associates in April 2011. Now, with a firm of just two lawyers, it’s a definite change. “I have done that because it’s just a great opportunity to practice with my son and the policy of the firm I was with didn’t allow nepotism, which I think is a good policy. This firm does [allow that], though,” Ray says with a laugh.
In Ray’s 32 years in law, he says one thing he has found very helpful was being involved with the Chattanooga Bar Association.“I had practiced in Chattanooga six or seven years, and was just eligible to get a rating with Martindale Hubbell, and nobody knew me,” Ray says. “Most of my work was out of the courtroom and with lawyers from out of town, and so I just registered as zero.” Joining the CBA was a great vehicle for Ray to get his name on the map and to know other lawyers in town, he says. Ray started off on the “tell-all” committee before the Internet was implemented, where people could call and pick out a topic of law and hear a five-minute spill on that topic. From there, Ray ran for the board of governors, secretary/treasurer, president elect, and eventually president.
“That was great exposure for me to get to know other lawyers, for them to get to know me, and that solved my recognition problem,” Ray says. In being a successful lawyer, Ray says there are three things he thinks are important. First and foremost, you have to give the clients the right advice, he says. “If you tell them the wrong thing and steer them down the wrong path, they’re never going to come back again,” he says. The second thing is to get everything to them in a prompt manner.
“Clients depend on you, so do your best to get things to them on time when you say you will. That will make a huge difference and set you apart,” Ray says. The last tip for success is to be fair, not over billing clients, and not billing them for time that is not fair. If you had a learning curve, take that into account in your bills, he says. “If you get those three things together, getting it right, being on time and pricing it fairly, I think you will have clients coming back year after year,” he says.
Ray is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and says this is a big part of his life. His wife of 35 years, Minnie Alice (Sissy) Ray, and he have seven children, and Ray is very much involved as a scoutmaster. One of Ray’s favorite hobbies is something called geocaching, where participants find hidden containers all over the world that each have their own Web page and coordinates on how to find it.
“Some people say, ‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’ But the neat thing about geocaching is that it takes you to places you wouldn’t think of going otherwise, like historical markers or beautiful views of different things … and [it] helps you discover a part of life you wouldn’t get otherwise,” Ray says. Discovering a part of life one wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to is something Ray is on board with in blazing the family trail of being the first father and son team to work together in the seven generations and enjoying the fruit that this branch of the family tree develops.