‘If You Want to Be a Lawyer, Go Be One’

To celebrate the 20th issue of Missouri & Kansas Super Lawyers, we caught up with five former cover subjects: José Bautista (2018), James Cooling (2005), Don Downing (2012), Todd Graves (2017), and Susan Ford Robertson (2014).

Robertson, an appellate attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, is still having the time of her life. So is her father, who practices trial law at the age of 88. “My dad told me, ‘Do something that makes you want to get up, jump out of bed and can’t wait to see the day,’” she says. “That’s what he does, and I picked up on that.”

Below, these five attorneys share how their practices and lives have changed in the last 20 years, and where they think the law is headed.

An Evolving Practice

Todd P. Graves, Graves Garrett Greim; General Litigation; Kansas City: We used to wear a suit to the office every single day, and when I first started out they told us we could wear a sport coat on Saturday when we came in. I think the practice is much more informal, much more diffuse. … It has changed my outlook on life. I find it pointless to argue over inconsequential things. I’m much more of a pushover than I once was, since I realize how pointless it is to argue about it.

Don M. Downing, Gray Ritter Graham; Class Action & Mass Torts; St. Louis: My practice has changed dramatically. Twenty years ago, I left a big corporate defense firm where I was doing commercial litigation and I switched over to a small plaintiff’s boutique litigation firm, the one I’m with now. It’s been very rewarding to represent the little guy against big corporations. When you get a good result for a small business or a farmer or a consumer, it typically means more to them than when you get a good result on the defense side for a big corporation. It really makes you feel good about what you do when you’re able to get compensation for them. It doesn’t always completely undo the damage, but it helps.

Susan Ford Robertson, The Robertson Law Group; Appellate; Kansas City: Fifteen years ago, my partner and I came to Kansas City and started The Robertson Law Group. It’s just been spectacular. It has proven to be successful in every aspect I hoped it would be. When we first started, people were like, “OK, if we lose a case and get a bad judgment or verdict, we’ll call you.” We’ve been successful in educating them that it is a supplementary service that we don’t duplicate. We can provide a lot of help to trial lawyers early on.

José M. Bautista, Bautista LeRoy; Transportation & Maritime; Kansas City: One thing that we started doing five years ago was police brutality cases, where we sue a government entity for using excessive force on citizens and deprivation of their civil rights. Immunities that are provided to the particular defendant these days, and law enforcement, are getting so broad that it was making what was already a difficult case to prosecute even more difficult. … Nursing home litigation has become the largest part of our practice. If I have one railroad grade-crossing case that I take on a year, we’re probably taking on 15 nursing home cases.

James E. Cooling, Cooling & Herbers; Aviation & Aerospace; Kansas City: Our national and international clients have just exploded. During the pandemic, nobody that had any money wanted to fly on the airlines, and everybody who had sufficient means wanted to acquire an aircraft. It was the two busiest years of our law practice. And it’s continued.

Stand-Out Successes

Bautista: My favorite recent case is Hanshaw v. Crown Equipment, which involved a poorly designed forklift that caused a young warehouse worker to lose his leg. A 21-year-old, Christopher was forced to decide whether he wanted his leg cut off at the ankle or below the knee—just several days after he started his first real job. After months of painful therapy and retraining, he got married, began a career in IT, and is now training for Tough Mudder races with advanced prosthetics. The case is currently on appeal on an evidentiary issue, and I don’t know how it will ultimately turn out. What I do know is that Christopher is an inspiration and I’m better for just having known him and worked on his case.

Cooling: Our successes are all quietly achieved. We are fortunate to represent the most well-known U.S. and international corporations and high net worth individuals. When we go to the movies or sports events, there’s a good chance we are seeing our clients do what they do best.

Downing: Syngenta, a foreign company that has significant agricultural operations in the United States, had a new, genetically modified corn seed they were working on for sale in the U.S. Syngenta was warned by all the big grain companies: Please don’t commercialize that seed in the United States unless China approves it; if China detects this new gene that they haven’t approved in our exports to them, they’re going to stop taking our corn. Sure enough, Syngenta went ahead, notwithstanding the warnings, and commercialized that seed. It ended up in international grain channels and then China stopped taking U.S. long-grain rice. As a result, the price of U.S. corn on the Chicago Board of Trade plummeted and U.S. corn farmers lost a lot of money. We tried the first case for about three weeks in federal court in 2017 in the District of Kansas, and we got a $217.7 million verdict for the Kansas corn farmers. We ended up settling the entire Syngenta corn litigation, nationally, for $1.51 billion.

Robertson: In a case that came out of the talc cases out of St. Louis, the Missouri Supreme Court granted a writ on venue. The reason that it’s meaningful is I’ve been trying for years to get relief on the venue issue. And then the case became codified into a statute. Two years later, in 2021, a husband and wife called and said that there was an injunction granted against them on the removal of an enclosure over their pool filter system in their backyard. They said it was worth hiring a lawyer because of the way they were treated by the homeowners association. The Missouri Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, reversed the Court of Appeals decision and said, “You owe zero.” So you have one with really complicated corporate interests with recurring problems that need to change for many, many people; and then you have one that was just very personal to two people.

Learning Curves

Bautista: I’ve come to realize that litigation is very difficult on the client, even though they’re the ones suing. So I always make a concerted effort, when I meet with clients for the first time, to tell them about what they’re getting into. The last thing I want is to go into a long battle with folks who may underestimate what is going to be needed of them—and what they’re about to go through and for how long.

Robertson: I’m better at managing client expectations. You can never predict the outcome. I’ve had clients say, “Even though we lost, we at least understood the process, every step of the way. You were transparent in explaining to us what we could anticipate. Even though we might not have been successful, we felt we got our say.”

Graves: I was a prosecutor for 12 years. And I tell people when they’re in trouble that the number of truly evil people that I encountered as a prosecutor, I can count on a few fingers on one hand. People, oftentimes, have done a lot of good things. And on one day, or a series of days, they did something that wasn’t good. It wasn’t who they are.

Downing: I’ve become an even stronger believer in our justice system. The jury is going to give the little guy, as well as the big corporation, a fair shake, and juries usually get it right. I’ve seen that operate in actual practice, even though the big corporations that we’ve taken on had virtually unlimited resources. In terms of human nature, the older I get the more I’ve learned that all of us have both good and bad in us. I see that in lawyers. I see it in clients. I see it in everyone, including myself.

The Upside of Change

Graves: A way it’s changed for the better is computer research. We’re the last generation that dealt with books. Every law firm had a big library and you’d go bury yourself in it. You’d have a desk piled three feet high with reports and digests, and ferreting out the law was a much bigger process.

Cooling: The speed of what we do is probably five times the speed of what we did years ago—maybe 10 times. The principles of taking care of people have not changed.

Downing: I think the younger generation of lawyers has a more sustainable view of the work-life balance issues than we did when we were young lawyers. There used to be, for lack of a better word, hazing when you were in law school. Professors would question you and try to embarrass you and make you look bad. They thought they were training you to handle yourself in front of judges who might do the same in a courtroom. A lot of students would graduate and go into the big firms and the hazing would continue by the senior partners. I think that’s changed a lot over the years.

Robertson: During COVID, everything from oral arguments to jury selection to mediations to depositions went remote. That has remained post-shutdown, and it’s more efficient. I see way more faces of my out-of-state clients because they can use those remote platforms.

… And the Downside

Downing: One of the problems with technology compared to 20 years ago is that you always have to be on. No matter where you are, no matter what type of vacation you’re trying to take, you’re always reachable. And everybody knows it. In my field, there is far more advertising for cases today than there was 20 years ago, particularly in mass torts.

Robertson: People are frustrated, and they’re not really sure who to direct their frustration at. So unfortunately I see aggressive, uncivilized, undignified behavior by a few lawyers. Sometimes juries are angry. Some of the verdicts in Missouri have been astronomical. I don’t think those are sustainable.

Graves: With the work-at-home model, while there are aspects of it that I love, the human capital we built over the last 20 years—we’re squandering that. If you’re a young attorney and you never spend any time with other people, or you’re a team of attorneys working on a matter and trying to do it by phone call, I think that changes things. I know that I’m meaner by text than I am in person.

Predictions

Robertson: I go to national conferences and listen to dire predictions about litigation—that it’s too expensive, it’s too risky, no one’s going to try cases, appellate practitioners are going to be gone as an area. I’ve been hearing that for years, and I do not see that happening at all. AI is a concern, and I certainly never want to be replaced. But I think that the way cases are handled, at least here in the Midwest, will remain that way for a while.

Cooling: Everybody talks about how AI is going to change the world. Aviation technology has developed to where anyone in an emergency can just push a button and the airplane will land safely at the closest airport. That’s all artificial intelligence that’s already being used. How that’s going to translate into law practices? We’ll know soon, as we use AI in our law practice.

Bautista: I think the future is nursing home litigation. Everyone I know my age is either about to consider a nursing home or plan a future [there] or has a relative that’s already there. I don’t see that slowing down—I see that as expanding. The same goes for sex abuse cases: I think the courts and the legislators are starting to realize how important it is that those are prosecuted in this day and age. Statutes of limitation are being expanded to address the wrongs, which signals future litigation in this area.

Downing: I’m worried about a politicization of our justice system. I think too many people today view the results that come down—whether it’s from the U.S. Supreme Court or a federal district court judge or a state appellate court—as politically driven. I still believe, far and away, the vast, vast majority of all decisions are made by judges who want to get it right under the law.

Graves: You used to need your law firm near the courthouse. Now a lot of that’s done electronically, including appearances. I’m not sure that you need one place or one firm, and I don’t know what kind of alliances or business organizations are going to go up. But something is going to be different based on it, and I think it’s going to get more diffuse.

Advice for Up-and-Coming Attorneys

Cooling: There are many areas of the law besides private practice that are rewarding: being in-house counsel with corporations, working for government agencies, working for nonprofits. Pick an area you want to spend your life learning about—and becoming the best in—and go for it.

Graves: When I came out of law school in 1990, I had an offer to come out to New York for like $95,000 a year. And I had an offer from the Missouri Attorney General’s Office for $26,000 a year. And I followed my passion. Do what you thought you wanted to do before you went to law school, and you’re going to be happier long term than if you follow immediate financial rewards.

Downing: Find work that you enjoy doing because, if you enjoy doing the work, you won’t dread the hours. Find something outside the practice of law that you enjoy, and devote some time to that, too. And keep yourself physically fit, eat healthy foods and exercise regularly. I think people who do that are better mentally prepared to go into the courtroom or go into that deposition or do that transaction.

Bautista: This is a very small legal community. You’re going to see your peers everywhere. You’ll see them at your bar conferences. You’ll see them on the other side of the table. You’ll see them in cases. Practice professionalism and courtesy. It’ll go a long way to having a very stable and enjoyable and successful practice.

Robertson: Don’t listen to the naysayers and don’t listen to the foreboding that’s out there on social media. I heard that in 1983. If you want to be a lawyer, go be one. Don’t listen to anybody else.

Magazine Memories

Downing: It was definitely a conversation starter from people I hadn’t heard from in a while. I thought “The Good Seed” was a very catchy caption, and several people commented to me. I’d done so much with farmers, and I grew up on a farm, so it was a nice thing to say on the cover.

Cooling: I took the magazine home and showed it to my wife. She looked at it and she said, “I’ll be impressed when you’re on the cover of Super Husband magazine.” … [Being on the cover] was a compliment to our entire team, and the hard work that we had done to represent world-class clients with their aviation-related legal matters.

Graves: It was a milestone in my career. I had one very close friend who had a professionally framed collage made of the article that hangs in my office now.

Robertson: It was unexpected, and the experience was very fantastic. … Appellate lawyers, we don’t get a lot of visibility—either in public or within the profession—so it was definitely a high point in my career.