Very few things chronicle the passage of time better than technology. When attorney Wayne Peters got his first computer, he knew that it needed one specific characteristic: it had to be portable.
“It weighed 36 pounds, had a built-in keyboard and printer, and had to be plugged in, but it was portable,” Peters remembers. “One floppy disk with 56k of memory, and I expanded it to two floppy disks. Then I added a 10 megabyte hard disk. They said, ‘you could save all the information you’ll ever need on this 10 megabyte hard disk.’”
You can’t even fit a good lawyer joke meme on 10 megabytes these days.
Peters remains an avid technology user in the two areas for which he purchased that first computer, both as the pastor of a small country church and as the sole remaining founding partner of Gearhiser Peters Elliott & Cannon, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of its founding in July.
“Wayne is well-known to be computer savvy and uses it probably as effectively as any of the younger lawyers in our office,” says Peters’ longtime colleague Sam Elliott, who’s been with the firm since 1982. “We’ve done a remarkably good job at keeping up with technological advances. So as the computer world has expanded and has redefined in some ways how we practice law, we’ve tried to keep up with it.”
It’s that meshing of modern methods for a traditional set of practice areas – litigation and trials, business matters, tax planning and audits, trusts and estate planning primary among them – with a decidedly old-school, family focused foundation for building and sustaining a firm that drove Peters and since-passed founding partners Charles Gearhiser and Sid Carpenter to spin the firm up in the first place.
“Charlie, Sid and myself were members of the firm of Stophel, Caldwell and Heggie, which at the time I believe was the largest firm in Tennessee,” Peters says. “One day, I spoke with Charlie, and he was upset with something that had been done. And I spoke to Sid the same day, and he was also upset with something. So I suggested we go to dinner and that evening we signed a letter saying that we were resigning from the firm and forming our own firm effective July 1, 1974.
“We had a good combination: Sid headed up the corporate and transactions, Charlie headed litigation and I headed certain aspects of the tax and business part of the business,” Peters continues. “In fact, some of the clients that were clients on July 1, 1974, are still clients of the firm, and in some of those situations, I’m working with the fourth generation of those clients: some new businesses, some continuing old businesses. So we’ve really been blessed in that regard.”
Support throughout
Any firm worth its retainer is also going to need a viable mix of experienced hands and new talent to keep its clients and business moving forward. In Gearhiser Peters’ case, that means a purposeful balance in managing a roster of 14 attorneys, plus support staff.
“We’ve seen, of course, a great growth in the number of lawyers in Chattanooga, and there are a few outstanding firms for whom their goal through advertising and other endeavors seems to be to grow the size of their firm,” Peters says. “We have not taken that path. Our goal has been to have a good, core group of attorneys and support personnel, so that we can handle complicated multimillion dollar transactions all the way down to…well, last week I did a will for a family that couldn’t afford a lawyer.
“We have a lot of ability here and, as long as we all can make a reasonable living, we are very flexible on what we do.
That investment in personal growth, potential and flexibility was something that attracted Lee Ann Adams to hang her shingle with Gearhiser Peters 27 years ago and grow her practice from there.
“Other than summer clerk positions, this is the only firm I have worked for,” Adams says. “When I clerked at other firms and talked to friends, I was concerned that some firms would not allow me to pursue other interests in addition to practicing law.
“I knew I wanted a family. I knew I wanted to participate in my church. I wanted to participate in other activities. And I just had concerns that I would not be able to do all those things at some other firms just based on what I had observed,” says Adams, who among other external leadership pursuits was president of the Chattanooga Bar Association in 2022. “But when I interviewed with Gearhiser, and it became clear that we had folks that were amateur historians, that we had people who were professional preachers, that we had folks that went on mission trips for weeks at a time, that this was a firm that would allow me to practice law with excellent people, but would also let me be myself, let me pursue my interests.
“Not only have they let me work, they have supported me, encouraged me. There’s times that I didn’t feel like I could do something or take a leadership role and people here have said, ‘No, you can do it, and we’re going to help you.’ So it’s just been a wonderful and supportive place to be.”
Rolling with the changes
It’s both opportunity and necessity that keeps the firm’s veteran practitioners pivoting on how they approach their client work. “When I first started practicing, the courts were much busier than they are these days, because no one had ever really heard of mediation,” Elliott says. “Now, mediation resolves about 90-95% of the cases that it’s ordered in or, or the parties agree to mediate in where usually you’d go to court and get it resolved there. And that’s freed up time for the courts to deal with other things.”
Merging that idea with an organization size that keeps all parties nimble makes the firm still an attractive place to practice even after five decades in business. “I feel like we are big enough to give us a safety net,” Adams says. “If I’ve got a down year, then I know that Sam’s probably got an up year.
“We’re big enough to provide the financial support and the brain support, yet small enough that I know people’s names. And I know their children’s names, I know where they went to school, I know their interests, and I know if their mother was in the hospital last week,” she continues. “That community and that sense of intimacy appeals to me, and I would not want to be someplace where that was lost.”
Half a century in, Peters remains a very active part of the firm he helped found, putting the principles his initial partners codified that night at dinner into practice every day. Still, he knows the firm’s future will eventually be in others’ hands, and that’s what he points his efforts toward on a consistent basis.
“I think one of our goals is in our hiring of attorneys now and in the future, we are doing a lot for succession,” Peters says. “In other words, we have lawyers at every age group – me being the oldest – and we make a very special effort to have younger lawyers involved on matters with clients and we discuss that with clients for succession purposes.
“We think that’s the future of the firm, that as we work together on projects, which usually involves sometimes one of the older attorneys and one of the younger members of the firm, we can keep the firm going forward and maintain our traditional practice.”