Atlanta Lawyers on the Move — Episode 2
Lee Wallace
Owner
The Wallace Law Firm, L.L.C.
Interview Transcript
PAMELA: Hi, my name is Pamela DeNeuve and welcome to Atlanta Lawyers on the Move. Today I am very pleased and honored to have our guest Lee Wallace and let me tell you a little bit about Lee. Lee Wallace represents whistle-blowers reporting fraud against the government and also handles plaintiffs’ side catastrophic injury and product liability cases. She is a registered mediator with the State of Georgia Commission on Dispute Resolution and mediates at Bay Mediation. Lee is a past President of the Georgia Association for Women Lawyers. Lee was first in her class at Vanderbilt University and was an honors graduate of Harvard Law School. After clerking on the US Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, she began practice in Atlanta. Lee has been practicing more than 20 years and in that time has worked on matters in 20 different States.
In a polling of 24, 000 Georgia Lawyers, Lee was named one of the top 100 Lawyers in Georgia. She has been named a Georgia SuperLawyer every year since the poll began and has repeatedly been named one of the top 50 Female Lawyers and is one of the top 10 product liability lawyers in Georgia. Lee also has been asked to serve on the Blue Ribbon panel that evaluates Lawyers for the SuperLawyer award. Georgia Trend Magazine has named Lee Wallace one of Georgia’s Legal Elite. Lee chaired the Product Liability Section of the Georgia State Bar. She has edited a book on medical negligence and published numerous articles on plaintiffs’ personal injury issues.
Welcome, Lee!
LEE: Thank you.
PAMELA: We’re so glad to have you for Atlanta Lawyers on the Move.
LEE: Thank you.
PAMELA: I would like to ask you our questions and the first one is: when and what made you decide to become a Lawyer?
LEE: My grandmother told me when I was young- she said, “You can be either a doctor or a lawyer. I do not care which but you have to pick either one of those two.” And I really was scared of blood. So it was an easy choice that I would pick law. Really, I was sort of a natural — you know — from a young age, I was really great at arguing, I loved and I have always liked law and things like that. I was very nervous about becoming a lawyer. In fact, I thought I was disqualified because I had the same fear that they say is the number one fear of adults which is the fear of speaking and I thought lawyers had to speak all the time and I was afraid to do that.
So I took a class in college, took a speech class — I took it pass/fail because I thought surely I can pass but I might be right on the edge. And it turned out, I loved public speaking. I ended up doing great in class. I won a school speaking contest. I won $100 and then that led to me being on the debate team and I won a debate tournament, first place individual speaker and somehow realized that what I thought was disqualifying me from being a lawyer actually was something that I really enjoyed doing. And now it is one of my favorite things, to speak to groups.
PAMELA: That is really wonderful. You really went to excellent schools like Vanderbilt and Harvard. And did — you know — were at the top of your class. Was that something that was difficult or you are just a natural — you are just a natural student?
LEE: I think it would be a combination of things — I mean — obviously my family background was, my grandmother, the one I mentioned earlier, was a Middle School grammar teacher. My grandfather was a Principal and schooling was incredibly important in my family. But I never — you know — my modus operandi always was that I was going to work harder than anybody else all the time. I think that had a lot more to do with sort of the grades and so forth — I just worked non-stop. I really believed in hard work.
PAMELA: Oh great! So then that was one of the things that your family imparted to you which was a desire and the drive to work hard and try to be the best at what you are doing?
LEE: Definitely!
PAMELA: That is great. Well, you represent whistleblowers. How did you get into that practice?
LEE: Well, I initially began representing plaintiffs in catastrophic injury and auto products cases. I had legal matters all over the country — 20 States. But a friend referred a whistleblower case to me, it is also called a Qui Tam case and I did not know anything about that kind of law at the time and I took my first one. So I went to the law library and literally read treatises — I mean multi-volume treatises. Started at the beginning, the first page, read through them. I read everything that they had on whistleblowing law. There are three things that I really loved about the practice. One is that it is intellectually very hard. I find that really stimulating. Another thing is that you always feel like you are on the right side because what you are trying to do is get back money that was taken from the government by fraud and that just feels right. And then the third thing is that I really love the clients.
My very first client was a guy named Buster Rodriguez, who was a helicopter maintenance repair guy and he had been shot down in a helicopter while he was serving in Vietnam. So now fast forward, his son is serving in Iraq. So he took a job over there as a helicopter maintenance repair manager because he wanted to make sure that any helicopter that he touched was not going to go down like his had gone down. So he found out that the defense contractor that he was working for was over-billing the government. They were billing for time that the — they were supposed to be paid just for the hours that their employees worked. But instead of doing that, they were telling people here is your hour and a half for lunch but they were starting the clock back up after just half an hour, while nobody was back yet from lunch.
That wasn’t how it was supposed to work. Because he was the kind of guy who liked to do the right thing, he just assumed that they would want to pay this money back and he offered to help them do that. You know, they were, needless to say, not particularly excited about it. It is quite a story in fact what happened to him.
PAMELA: Lee, that sounds like a great story. Could you tell us a little bit about what happened?
LEE: Yes. My client, whose name was Buster, was working for a defense contractor in Iraq and he had gone on vacation. On his way back from his vacation, he stopped at the corporate headquarters in Dubai and that is when he found out about the over-billing and told them, “No problem. I can help you figure out how much it was and we can pay it back — you know- we will work this out.” Well, that apparently wasn’t what anybody else wanted. So Buster heads into his site where he has worked for a couple of years now and he is suddenly told that they no longer have a bed for him to sleep in. They pull some cot out and put him in a supply room and he ends up- the next morning they wake him up at the crack of dawn after he has been traveling for 24 hours to get there. And they wake him up and say, “You are being transferred to another site and you have 24 hours to get there.”
They take him to a helipad, put him on a helicopter, but it flies over the site where he is supposed to report and into Baghdad. So there are no flights from Baghdad to where he is supposed to report. So they give him — well, he has no way to get there within the 24 hours he is supposed to report within that period of time. So he grabs a ride with a Blackwater patrol across Baghdad to a different airport that should have — that does have a flight to the place where he is going. But it is a harrowing journey across Baghdad because they come under fire and the jeep behind him is hit while they are in the process of going across Baghdad. He finally makes it, flies in, makes it to the place in the nick of time within the 24-hour period to report.
But when he gets there, they tell him they have no record of him having been transferred there and they have no bed for him to sleep in. So he got the message that he was no longer welcome at the company and came back to the United States. And after that, I began representing him. He is just that kind of person that really wanted to do the right thing and believed that about everybody else too and those are great people to represent.
PAMELA: Wow what a story! I am sure it was justice for you to represent him. So what do you enjoy about your practice? I know you enjoy working with the people. What else do you enjoy about it?
LEE: I really like how intellectually hard it is. I think that is a lot of fun — you know — my egghead background, I really like that. I also like the fact that it is always learning
something brand new. You are always learning an industry, something that you had no reason to know about were it not for your doing this kind of case. You know — how does the customs industry work? Or how do anesthesiologists bill Medicare? You know, things like that are just really fun to learn. I enjoy that a lot.
PAMELA: Wow that is really interesting! So what are your next career goals?
LEE: I am going to be a mediator at Bay Mediation. This is something I’ve wanted to do since Law School. When I was at Harvard, the mediation movement was just starting and I took a negotiation workshop class. It’s now a famous class people go from all over the country to take this — practicing lawyers but they also made it available for students. So I took this and I just absolutely loved it and the professor told me that he gave me the highest grade in the class and I took his mediation class, also the mediation class he wrote the book for. It was the first legal textbook on mediation and it is still used at a lot of law schools, many editions later.
And then I even did my third-year paper — at Harvard, you had to do a third-year paper and I did mine on ADR. I just loved it. I thought it was really interesting and it seemed inherently a better way to do things. If you could let people resolve their conflicts and work them out as opposed to 12 strangers just announcing who wins and how much. It just seemed like a better way to do things. But if you are going to mediate, you really need experience because it is not just about techniques and people getting along and how to move people towards resolution. A lot of it is about experience and knowing what are the pitfalls, what are the touch points in a case so you can help people figure out what is the value of the case, and how do we get this resolved and get it off the tables before it has to go to a trial and strangers make the decision about it? How do we keep the decision making in the hands of the people who have the case?
PAMELA: Interesting! Wow, that is really a nice segue in your career. So tell me, what advice do you have for anyone who is struggling or facing difficulties in their goals?
LEE: I have something specific that I advise women about, particularly ones newer in their careers, but really at any stage. I think women fall prey to what I call the “A-trap” because, in school, the way things work is you go to school, you get an assignment, you make an A on the assignment. You do that often enough, you get an A in the class. You do that often enough, you get promoted. You do that often enough, you go to a good school. There are always assignments and you just do that assignment, you get the grade and you get the next thing you are reaching for.
Well, the problem is, if you are used to that approach when you come out of school, life is not like that. You do not get an assignment that you can succeed on and make an A and then move- you know, further your career. Your assignments are something you do that are almost — they are a part of your career but they are separate in a way. Your career has to be managed differently and no one is going to give you the assignments — you know — go meet five people, go have lunch with these people, go join this club. People don’t give you those assignments. The assignments you get are just from your boss related to that job but not your career. And it is really important that anyone, particularly women I think, look up and think, not just, “What is this assignment, what do I need to get done?” But look up and say, “Where is my career heading? Where do I want to be?” And that is even — although I’ve been practicing 30 years, that is what I am doing now. I still want to do the whistleblower cases. I am not going to stop that but I also want to mediate. It is something that I have wanted to do for many years now and so I am trying to proactively say, “What do I want to do as my next step?”
PAMELA: Wow that is really great because a lot of people are not making those — are not asking those questions. They are just holding their heads down and they are enduring whatever situation they are in. So it sounds like you are very proactive and you are recommending that women lawyers become more proactive with their careers.
LEE: Yes. Very much so!
PAMELA: So as a peak performer — you know — you are a SuperLawyer. You are a top lawyer in Georgia. You really have exemplified being a peak performer. What legacy do you want to leave?
LEE: I will tell you that there are three things that I want to — the legacy that I would like to leave. One is that I helped other women in their careers. And one of the things that probably I am proudest of in my whole career and I enjoyed the most was being President of the Georgia Association for Women Lawyers. And when I was President we were encountering the fact that a lot of women were really hitting the glass ceiling. Women had been in Law School in sufficient numbers by then — like 50% — that they should have been a pretty decent percentage of the partners in law firms. But they were nowhere near the percentage that corresponded to how many were coming through in Law School. We also saw that there was a greater pay disparity between women lawyers and men lawyers than there was in other types of industries which seemed really odd.
So we wanted to do something about that. We wanted to change that and there were a couple of initiatives we did. One was a study called “It’s About Time” that looked at some of the issues surrounding part-time work for women lawyers. What we found was that part-time work meant 37.5 hours per week and that was part-time in the legal industry. Then there were a lot of things that came out of that that we learned of. We also started a leadership academy for women in the 7–10-year range of their careers to help them move past that junior partner into the senior partner accomplishments. And that I was really passionate about and am still very passionate about helping women in their careers.
I also would like to be known as a peacemaker. As someone who helped people resolve their cases. To get those cases done and settled. I would love to be that and look forward to that. And on the whistleblower cases, I want to leave a legacy of getting $100 million back from the government that was taken from it by fraud, back for taxpayers.
PAMELA: Wow that is really amazing! Thank you for sharing that. You know when you talk about your initiatives for helping women lawyers, I can see how you are such an example and how you have been in a leadership role as far as the legal community of being one of the top lawyers and being proactive. And then the leadership with GAWL and to not just be the President of GAWL but to start initiatives that would help women and that is really wonderful, in addition to your law practice and all your other responsibilities. So I really take my hat off to you.
Our final question on Atlanta Lawyers on the Move that we ask our lawyers is name at least one thing that you do to handle stress.
LEE: I love to read. I read all the time, non-stop. From the time I get up till the time I go to bed. Part of it is for work — sure — but I also like to read for pleasure. I like to read novels, things that are fun, frivolous and not self-improvement stuff. I really like just fun, escapism novels.
PAMELA: Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. And just my final question is being a lawyer and really handling those most challenging cases- especially the whistleblower and now getting into mediation- what do you think is your motivator that keeps you seeking — I guess seeking excellence?
LEE: It would be the fact that — part of it that is who I am and that is what I believe in. It is just something that you automatically do. I also believe strongly in business coaching and in the idea that a coach can help you perform and can keep you focused and can keep you headed in the direction that you need to go. So it is somebody from the outside who can help you think through, just as I mentioned earlier about women needing to look up and think through their careers. This is somebody to help you remember that and focus on that and help you maintain that push forward on your career.
PAMELA: That is really wonderful! Thank you so much, Lee, for being our guest on Atlanta Lawyers on the Move. And to our audience, thank you so much for joining us and we hope to see you next week.
LEE: Thank you.