An Eagle Scout Takes to the Skies

One flight that stands out for Ivy Cadle is when he transported a woman battling a rare autoimmune skin disorder from Augusta to Panama City, Florida.

“She was a really inspirational person given all she was dealing with,” says Cadle, an eminent domain attorney at Baker Donelson in Macon, and immediate past president of the State Bar of Georgia. “Her ability to do things that we take for granted was really limited. There’s a lot she could focus on that was negative, but she was just super fun. … We were both very pleased to get up to 8,000 feet, to where it cools off, since we did not having an air conditioner in my airplane.” 

Cadle’s work with Angel Flight Soars—a Georgia-based nonprofit coordinating free medical flights since 1983—began during the pandemic when he transported COVID test kits from the airport to area hospitals in his Cessna 182.

He first read about the program while taking flying lessons in the 2010s and it immediately appealed to him.

Cadle grew up in Swainsboro, a southeastern Georgia town nestled between Augusta, Macon and Savannah. His father is an attorney, and Cadle recalls going with him to the records room of the local courthouse. “I was 14 or 15 years old, and he wanted to show me how fun it was,” Cadle says. Instead, the teenager noted that records were housed inside a dreary, smoky vault with no windows. “I decided right then and there that this lawyer thing was not for me.”

Initially, he leaned toward medicine, taking EMT classes in high school and serving as an EMT while earning college credits. “I drove an ambulance and did hundreds of volunteer hours at the hospital,” says Cadle, an Eagle Scout who was influenced by TV shows like ER.

But he began to feel burned out on science and medicine and wanted to try something else. So he earned a master’s in accounting and worked for several years as an auditor for KPMG in Atlanta. But he felt he wasn’t using his creativity to full potential.

“I spent my whole childhood running away from being a lawyer,” he says, but wound up at Mercer law school. His father was thrilled.

Eventually, so was he. “I didn’t even know what eminent domain was as a practice area when I first started,” he says. “I knew the government could take your property, but not what it meant from a law perspective. It’s an interesting intersection of business law, land-use title, private property rights and the civil litigation piece.”

2024 was a big year for Cadle: He was named managing shareholder for Baker Donelson’s Atlanta office while being appointed president of the State Bar of Georgia. As president, Cadle established the first special committee on artificial intelligence, whose top priority was ensuring that the Bar’s rules of professional conduct considered the consequences of attorneys using AI in their law practices.

“When you’ve got AI, you really just open up a Pandora’s box,” Cadle says. “What is law practice? If a member of the public goes on ChatGPT and says, ‘Hey, ChatGPT, my neighbor sued me. What do I do?,’ is that law practice? … We definitely want to know if our attorneys are using AI; and if they’re using it in their law practice do our rules of professional conduct contemplate the consequences of that? I think largely we found that they do because the human … who holds the license remains responsible to their client.”

For a time, Cadle also volunteered with Experimental Aircraft Association’s Young Eagles program, which was launched in 1992 to give kids aged 8-17 their first ride in an airplane. For Cadle, it recalls his own first big airplane trip, when, as a boy, he flew home to Georgia after visiting his grandparents in Illinois. “It’s just a neat experience to be a kid and discover the magic of flight,” he says. “To me, it still seems like magic that the air can hold up an airplane—thousands of pounds of metal. … If somebody’s got a kid who wants to go on an airplane ride, I will try and do what I can to make that happen.”

Last fall, with his service to the Bar of Georgia complete, Cadle returned to transporting patients for Angel Flight Soars—taking a father and his son, suffering from sickle cell anemia, from Jacksonville to Atlanta, and back again. Like the law, he says, “It’s a way to combine something that I really like doing with helping other people.”