Editorial
Front Page - Friday, August 6, 2010
Consumer bankruptcy lawyer offers clients understanding
David Laprad
Carol Walker Carter is a consumer bankruptcy lawyer. She serves clients through The Carter Firm, the sole proprietorship she launched in April. Born and bred in Chattanooga, Carter originally wanted to be a trial lawyer, like her late father, Clarence Walker.
- David Laprad
From time to time, attorney Carol Walker Carter has looked destiny square in the eyes and said, “No.” But fate has a way of bringing people around, and today, she’s doing what she now believes she was meant to do.
As a consumer bankruptcy lawyer, she’s also offering a timely service to her clients at The Carter Firm, the sole proprietorship she launched in April.
“I’m like an oncologist. You hope you never need a cancer doctor, but you want to know there’s a good one out there for when you need one. So, I hope you never need my services, but if you do, I’m here to help,” she says.
Born and bred in Chatta-nooga, Carter originally wanted to be a trial lawyer, like her late father, Clarence Walker. Her dad hadn’t steered her toward law, but she set off in that direction anyway, earning her undergraduate degree at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and her Juris Doctorate at what is now the University of Memphis.
“Memphis was the right choice for me, as I’d never been away from home, and I needed to learn to be independent. It was hard at first because I didn’t know anyone, and then, during my second year, my dad came down with lung cancer. I knew if I delayed my education and went home, it would kill him faster than the cancer, so I stayed in school,” she says.
In Memphis, Carter not only learned the law, but also how to think critically. Plus,
she learned to stand on her
own, even in difficult times. Armed with confidence and prepared for what she calls “the real world,” she returned to Chattanooga, took a job as a lawyer and experienced a head-on collision with destiny.
“I was going to be a trial lawyer. It never occurred to me that I would do anything else. But I was the low man on the totem pole, so my firm sent me to creditors meetings and bankruptcies to represent our clients,” she says.
Carter prepared proof of claims, protected the interests of her firm’s clients in 341 meetings, and immersed herself in creditor’s work. A couple of
years later, a local bankruptcy debtor’s council made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, so she changed jobs. Several years
later, Carter wrestled free of fate, certain she was headed in the wrong direction.
“It was good work, but it wasn’t what I had planned on doing. I had won the mock trial competition in law school! I had been named best advocate! I thought I was destined to be a litigator,” she says. So Carter left the debtor’s council and went to work with her father as a trial lawyer.
Then destiny played the two aces it had been holding up its sleeve: Carter met the man who would become her husband, and Chapter 13 bankruptcy trustee Kenneth Steel decided to hire a staff attorney.
“Greg and I were talking about getting married, and as much as I hated the idea of not being a litigator, he had three children from a previous marriage, so we were going to be putting together a family. With that in mind, I wanted a job with regular hours,” she says.
So Carter took the job with Steel, and would not seek work as a trail lawyer again. Although she parted ways with the trustee nine years later, it was to pursue a career in sales, purely for logistical reasons. Carter did well, climbing the ranks in each of the territories in which she was placed, but the job was not the best fit for her.
“I was good at sales, but I’m better at this. Plus, I couldn’t see who I was benefitting, so it wasn’t satisfying personally. Here, I can see the benefits I provide. Someone will walk in upset, and they’ll walk out a little calmer. I feel like I’m helping people,” she says.
Carter says working with a client is like performing an act in which she balances sympathy with firmness. While she lends an understanding ear to her clients, she also helps them realize where they stand according to the law.
“Most people who are declaring bankruptcy feel like a failure, so I try to impress upon my clients that they are not a failure because their finances are in a shambles. They are not a failure because the economy has been bad; they are not a failure because they assumed it would get better and it didn’t; and they are not a failure because they can’t dig themselves out,” she says.
“Maybe they took pay cuts; maybe they had an interruption in employment; maybe they made bad decisions, which is not a crime. I try to bring my clients to the point where they stop beating themselves up so we can move forward.”
At the same time, Carter says she must temper sympathy with a legal analysis of their case so her clients leave with an understanding of how the law will apply to their situation. And she must be resolute. “You will have clients who will want something they are not justified in having,” she says.
Carter also tries to help her clients walk away with a new definition of success.
“A lot of people judge themselves according to what they own, where they live and the kind of car they drive. And while it’s important to keep a roof over your head and food on your table, your relationship with your family, not how you spend your money, is the true measure of your success,” she says.
While fate eventually had its way with Carter, her deviations from the path it had set before her were not without benefit. In learning to stand on her own two feet, she earned the right to show others how to do the same. By leaving the law temporarily to place her family first, she gained the ability to tell a client that the measure of their success can be found in their relationships.
And because she gave up her dream of being a litigator to serve people in a different way, she can look a client square in eyes and say, without a shred of fabrication, that they can give up something they want in order to make a better life for themselves and others.
Destiny must be smiling.
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