And a River Runs Through Him

Long before he navigated courtrooms, Michael B. Terry was navigating rivers.

“My dad was an avid and extremely successful outdoorsman and environmental advocate, so I grew up in the woods and on the rivers,” Terry says.

Claude Terry, an Emory University professor who died in 2019, was such an expert in whitewater rafting and canoeing that he served as a technical advisor and stunt double for the film Deliverance. He was such a conservationist that among the leaders he advised was Jimmy Carter.

“Dad wasn’t a politician, but he got things done,” Terry says. “He was out there fighting for rivers, for the environment, for the public good, always more interested in people and nature than big companies or government. My dad’s advocacy shaped me as a lawyer and a person.”

A partner at the Bondurant law firm in Atlanta, Terry handles high-stakes class actions, trials, and appellate matters, and has a fondness for poring over text to find legal treasure. He has a scientist’s dedication to research.

“He always believes there is an answer, no matter how difficult the problem,” says Frank Lowrey, a Bondurant colleague and occasional co-counsel. “He is the best legal researcher in Georgia. If his search pulls up 1,000 cases, he’ll read 1,000 cases.”

Terry doesn’t believe in shortcuts. “There is no shortcut,” he says. “If you find what you’re looking for quickly, you aren’t looking broadly enough. If you do an electronic search and get three cases, they might be three great cases, but if you get 50 cases, you start seeing the whole field—you see the periphery, and you find the lexicon you need for proper searching.”

Terry has been involved in some of Georgia’s largest verdicts: a then-record $454 million verdict against Time Warner in a contract dispute involving the Six Flags Over Georgia amusement park in 1998; a record-breaking $1.7 billion punitive damages verdict against Ford Motor Company in 2022.

“Mike is instinctive and savvy, able to distill the issues very succinctly and persuasively,” says Jim Butler of Butler Prather, 

who was lead trial counsel in both cases to Terry’s secondary counsel/appellate attorney. “But his greatest skill is probably his exhaustive research. He finds everything and makes sense of it all.”

But Terry’s most significant victory may be the appellate work that overturned Georgia’s $350,000 cap on noneconomic pain and suffering damages in medical malpractice cases. 

The cap was part of a statewide tort reform law passed in 2005. It was quickly put to the test when real estate agent Betty Nestlehutt, who was disfigured in a 2006 face-lift operation, won a $1.265 million jury award at trial. When that verdict was appealed, as expected, Terry was hired to challenge the constitutionality of the cap before the Supreme Court of Georgia.

“The other side said there were no malpractice cases in Georgia before a certain date,” Terry says. “And if you do a Westlaw search, that’s what you see. No cases. But it used to be spelled differently: mala praxis. Two words. So if you only searched for ‘malpractice,’ you’d miss it.”

Terry found early cases out of Georgia in which the state supreme court used Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, a treatise published in 1765, to make decisions on common law. Which meant a citizen’s right to a jury trial for health-care negligence predates the 1798 adoption of Georgia’s Constitution. Which is why the current court unanimously struck down limits on jury awards in medical malpractice cases.

“Mike has this unique ability to see arguments others might miss—those that offer a clear legal path without forcing the court to take on unnecessary constitutional questions,” says Bondurant colleague Stephen Chance.

The appeal was televised. “The oral arguments were a show,” Terry recalls. “There were multiple cameras in the courtroom, print journalists. It was like a 1950s congressional hearing. When I approached the podium to speak, I was basically hyperventilating and had to let my pulse rate drop a little before talking. It was an extraordinarily complex argument, and the court had some very challenging questions, but in the end it went extremely well.”

“I think Mike truly enjoys and embraces the intellectual back-and-forth that happens in appellate courtrooms,” says former Chief Justice Harold Melton, who served on the Georgia Supreme Court from 2005 through 2021, and is now an occasional Terry opponent at Troutman Pepper Locke. “A lot of lawyers don’t really enjoy that part—they get defensive. Mike leans into it. He’s smart, energetic, always meticulously prepared. As justices, whether we agreed with him or not, we always knew the argument would be organized and persuasive. Even if you have a big brain and you’re extremely efficient, what he does still takes a ton of work. There’s a tirelessness to Mike that underlies everything.”

As a child, Terry was drawn to the wild rivers of Northeast Georgia. He was so good so early that he began guiding river trips at age 11. Rather than sit in the back as most guides did, he sat in front. “I was too short to see over the other people,” he says.

He got into kayak racing, too, and earned several national titles in youth competition before a wrestling injury at 17 curtailed his budding sports career. “I was taking anti-inflammatories and steroids that would be banned today, just to be able to train on the river and keep racing,” he says. “I couldn’t keep doing that to my body and realized that I needed to find a way to make a living with something other than my arms.”

He discovered an interest in environmental advocacy and the law, and in the years since, he’s realized that navigating a river and a legal case have similarities. “Both demand careful preparation, quick thinking, and guidance,” says Terry. “And both involve risk, and conditions that can change rapidly.”

So he traded the front seat of the raft for the front row of law classrooms at UGA. “Many folks occupied the back row because they didn’t want to be called on by the professor,” recalls William Droze of Troutman Pepper Locke, a classmate who has opposed Terry in court. “Mike always sat in the front row because he actually wanted to be called on. He grasped things quickly, had the confidence of his convictions, and was willing to stand toe to toe with the professors.”

As a 1L, Terry won the school’s moot court championship, which was presided over by Harold Clark, former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia. Later that summer, Terry ran into Clark, who asked what he was up to. He remembers explaining that he was doing regulatory work at a law firm when Clark told him, “You’re on the wrong path. You have a talent for standing up and talking in court.” Clark suggested Terry call Emmet Bondurant.

“That momentary interaction changed everything,” says Terry, who started as a summer associate at Bondurant’s firm 40 years ago.

“Emmet’s everything a lawyer can be,” Terry adds of his legal mentor, the famed trial lawyer who built his career taking on powerful interests and winning landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases like Wesberry v. Sanders, which established the “one person, one vote” rule.

Terry credits Bondurant with teaching him “how to try cases, how to argue appeals, but also how to be a person: how to be a lawyer and do what you think is right. When you fight for someone who’s been told they don’t matter—whether it’s an abuse survivor or a small client up against a big institution—then it’s worth doing.”

The Six Flags case with Jim Butler in 1998 marked a turning point in Terry’s career, demonstrating his ability to handle complex, high-stakes challenges. The amusement park’s investors successfully sued Time Warner for mismanaging the park to suppress its value. “We went through multiple rounds of appeals and it took five years to fully resolve, but the verdict was fully collected with interest,” says Terry. “That was the genesis of my appellate practice.”

“Mike is a five-tool player,” Lowrey says. “He’s a great appellate lawyer because he’s also a great trial lawyer. He can do as much or as little as lead counsel wants at trial, and that translates into superior appellate work.”

After that record verdict, Terry began receiving more appellate opportunities; he began taking cases on contingency or using result-based fees, which led him into different legal domains—“everything from RICO cases to discrimination cases,” he says. 

“He essentially created something new in Georgia as an economically viable practice,” says Lowrey. “And he’s the best at doing it, especially when it comes to preserving large verdicts on appeal.”

Melton was a justice on the Supreme Court when Terry argued the Six Flags case. “It helped shape Georgia premises liability law,” he says.

In recent years, Terry has taken on powerful institutions such as the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts of America, and private schools in child abuse litigation. 

“A friend called and asked me to help with a complicated Boy Scouts hearing,” Terry says. “Then I helped with the appeal. Then someone else asked for help in another Boy Scouts case, and then came the Catholic Church cases, then the Darlington School cases. And suddenly, I’m in 30 or 40 institutional child molestation cases.”

His work has opened new avenues for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to seek justice. His arguments in 2022 before the Supreme Court of Georgia led to the court’s ruling that the statute of limitations begins not when the abuse occurs but when the victim learns that an institution knew of the abuse and concealed it.

“That changed Georgia law in a way that could now have a great impact in other similar cases,” says Terry.

“The archbishop in the Catholic Church case says the cover-up is worse than the sin,” Terry continues. “I don’t agree that it’s worse, but it’s bad. The cover-up perpetuates the harm. It tells the victims, ‘You are wrong, and you don’t matter.’ But [the silver lining] about those cover-ups, from a legal perspective, is that they often allow you a longer period of time to sue.”

Terry’s reputation as Georgia’s appellate guru earned him a special invitation to reargue Georgia’s famous 1940s “Three Governors Case” during the Supreme Court’s 175th anniversary in December 2021. Getting into the vibe, he wore an era-specific gray flannel suit with a watch chain. 

In 2024, Terry nominated Bondurant for the American Bar Association Medal, one of the highest honors in the profession. “He’d already won everything you can win in law, but that one choked him up a little,” Terry says. “When he looked at the list of prior recipients—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Thurgood Marshall—he felt it.”

On some level it all goes back to the wild woods and the whitewater. “Growing up around the river, you see things that are worth protecting,” Terry says. “You learn that what’s right isn’t always what’s easiest. That’s true in nature, and it’s true in the law.”