When attorney William Colvin was young, his parents put him on a swim team. He wanted no part of it. He didn’t want to go to practice, he didn’t want to practice once he was there, and he was regularly thrown out of practice for misbehaving.
But something changed his attitude. While playing Marco Polo with the kids who had started on the team with him but had dropped out, he noticed he was swimming faster than the others. He liked that. Then he noticed he was quicker than the kids who had started with him but had stayed on the team. He liked that even better.
So, a competitor was born.
Colvin was still swimming as a junior at Vanderbilt - and he was more competitive than ever. So he decided to take the LSAT and go to law school.
“I was drawn to trial work. I like going up against a competitor. The law is like sports in that respect. You train, train, train, and you practice, practice, practice, and then you go one-on-one against your opponent,” he says.
While Colvin admits to being competitive, he doesn’t want people to get the wrong idea. He says a person can have a healthy or an unhealthy competitive streak. “Thinking about nothing but beating the other side, or not wanting to play by the rules, is unhealthy. I’m too much of a legalist for that,” he says.
That said, Colvin’s competitive nature has backfired on him from time to time during his more than 30 years of practice.
“There was a time when the bulk of my practice was outside Chattanooga. I’d take depositions in Santa Barbara one week and Philadelphia the next. And I was dealing with lawyers from large metropolitan areas.
“I had a case against Hugh Garner, an attorney for whom I have tremendous respect. He’s tough and as completive as anyone I know. I got clever and thought, ‘Hugh is filing a suit on this over there, so I’m going to file a separate suit in a different place.’ That’s what I was used to in the national arena.
“But I didn’t call Hugh to tell him what I was going to do. I just had my processor server hand the papers to his client. I got taught a lesson that day I have not forgotten for 20 years,” he says.
Colvin had forgotten the principles his mentors - Charlie Goins, Jody Baker and Jim Robinson - had taught him about the practice of law in Chattanooga: You attract more with honey than venom; you can always escalate your aggressiveness, but it’s difficult to scale back; and meticulous preparation and attention to detail are the key to winning cases.
“That’s the healthy perspective of competitiveness: Expect the best from everyone,” Colvin says.
Colvin has fared well over the years when he’s been competitive and followed the advice of his mentors. In a case early in his career, he was defense co-counsel for a woman who was suing a doctor for an injury that had occurred during surgery. During the trial, the expert witness for the plaintiff said he had “left the rat race of private practice” to avoid the associated pressures.
“I locked onto that statement because he had never seen the injury, treated the injury, or seen the technique my client used. During my portion of the closing argument, I said, ‘I hope you’ll remember what he said about his own career. Who is he to come in here and question what this doctor did to try to help this woman?’”
The jury returned a defense verdict within one hour.
Colvin grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and attended McCallie, where he was a boarding student for four years and graduated in 1969. His plan was to study chemistry and return to McCallie to teach and coach swimming. That plan lasted the first 15 minutes of his first chemistry class at Vanderbilt.
“I will never forget being in an amphitheater with 300 of my newest, closest friends and listening to a reel-to-reel tape of a Bach fugue. Then this guy comes in from a side door wearing John Lennon style glasses and says, ‘You’re probably wondering why I’m playing this psychedelic music. Because chemistry is a psychedelic subject,’” Colvin says.
Colvin immediately realized he’d chosen his major poorly and wound up studying English. He also signed a contract with the school’s ROTC to serve in the Navy after graduation, as he didn’t want to be plucked out of school to serve in the military.
“Our commander-in-chief abolished the draft two weeks later,” Colvin says, shaking his head.
Colvin was glad he served, though. Not only had military service become a part of what young men in his family did, he still relishes the experiences he had during his year in Washington D.C. working with Naval Intelligence and his two years on a nuclear-powered surface warship.
The future attorney met his future wife the day after he left the Navy. By the time he started taking classes at Cumberland School of Law - Samford University in Birmingham, they had their eyes on the future. “We figured if we could get through my first year of law school without killing each other, then we could make it through anything,” Colvin says.
The couple tied the knot halfway through law school and are still married today.
After Colvin graduated, the young couple moved to Chattanooga to be close to the people he had known in high school and college and to build their own lives. “I wanted to go through my professional life as Bill Colvin, not as someone’s son or brother,” he says, adding that his two brothers are older and were already established in their careers by the time he started his.
While working for his mentors from 1979 to 1984, Colvin did insurance defense work. Shoemaker Thompson then recruited him to handle trial work. Six weeks later, a breast implant case landed on his desk.
“That was my first medical device case. The woman had implants due to a double mastectomy and had literally gone to the doctor looking green,” he says.
One thing led to another, and Colvin still does medical device cases for plaintiffs. He also handles construction litigation for defendants and plaintiffs, railroad cases for plaintiffs, and represents insurance companies in coverage disputes.
Following the dissolution in 2006 of what had become Shoemaker, Witt, Gaither & Whitaker, Colvin joined another firm that wound up having to reduce its number of attorneys. As he and his wife sat on the deck of their home, contemplating his future, he realized he was “a different cat.”
“My plaintiff work didn’t fit well with the defense mentality of some of the places I’d been and the defense work I did didn’t fit well with the plaintiff’s places in town,” he says.
Colvin wound up opening his own practice in 2008. Given his emphasis on construction, this was risky due to what was taking place in the economy, but he outlasted the construction downturn and now has a thriving one-man firm.
“It’s been challenging, invigorating and exciting,” the former English student says, choosing his words deliberately. “The only person to whom I have to answer is my wife. And I’m very happy with that.”
As Colvin works out of a leased office at Cavett & Abbott in the Pioneer Building, he’s pleased with his decision as a junior in college to pursue the law. “I like helping people solve their problems, and I enjoy the intellectual stimulus of doing something different every day,” he says.
Colvin has also spent time serving his community and his profession. He has served on the McCallie Alumni Council, the Parents Council at GPS, and as a deacon at Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church, where he and his wife are members. He’s also involved with Young Life, a non-denominational ministry that reaches out to adolescents. Professionally, he was one of the original members of the local American Inns of Court and the Tennessee Association of Construction Counsel, and he has taught seminars on the admissibility of expert testimony for the Chattanooga Bar Association and the Inns of Court.
Colvin is also a member of the 2013 Class of Fellows of the Chattanooga Bar Foundation. “It’s an honor and a privilege to be in the same group of people who were brought in before me and along with me,” he says.
To relax, Colvin enjoys “running sporadically, lifting weights sporadically, and playing golf as much as possible.” Time with family, which now includes two sons-in-law and a granddaughter, is also high on his list of priorities.
“I’m blessed that I not only love both of the guys my daughters married but also that all three of us love to play golf,” he says.
Colvin reserves his most endearing comments for his wife, whom he calls “the chief financial officer” of his practice. “Having Jane stand with me through my more than 30 years of being a lawyer has meant more to me than I can say. Every family has challenges, and she has been unwavering in her support,” he says.
“Periodically she kicks me in the behind, but I usually need or deserve it,” Colvin adds, smiling.
Years ago, a competitor was born in a swimming pool. Today, he still likes to win, which is a boon for his clients, but he sees beyond his wins and losses in court to the impact he’s having on his community and his family. These are the reasons Colvin was invited to become a Fellow, and is deserving of the honor.