Another Kind of NASCAR Dad

 

A mild-mannered business lawyer, Caldwell has a discerning eye for what’s important to a deal and what’s superfluous. He moves effortlessly in the corporate towers of Charlotte and other big cities, shepherding mergers and acquisitions and sophisticated loan deals on behalf of financial institutions. But he also operates with aplomb in a realm far removed from the arcane, buttoned-down world of banking transactions — NASCAR, where garishly painted cars, fierce competition and weekends at the track are the norm. Among his clients are two of the sport’s headliners, Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr., as well as two teams with equally big names, Roush Racing and Evernham Motorsports.

 

How this unassuming 49-year-old attorney with Charlotte-based Robinson, Bradshaw & Hinson flows between two such seemingly divergent worlds comes down to his engaging, down-to-earth personality and his deal-making prowess. In the words of Geoff Smith, president of Roush Racing and an attorney himself, “There are two types of lawyers I come across — deal breakers and deal makers,” he says. “Stoke is a deal maker.”

 

 

Born on May 7, 1956, Caldwell spent his formative years in Roanoke, Va., a mid-sized city known for railroads and banking. His mother was a homemaker and his father was a traveling lumber salesman.

 

As a youngster, he was drawn to basketball and football, both as fan and player. He collected Matchbox cars, but his only exposure to stockcar racing, a sport that originated in the South, was having “a cousin in North Carolina who talked about Richard Petty a lot,” he recalls.

 

After earning an economics degree in 1978 from Hampden-Sydney College — a small, all-male liberal arts school about 100 miles east of Roanoke — Caldwell wasn’t sure about his career path. “Law was something I thought about,” he says, “but I took the easy route home and [accepted] a job at a local bank.” He joined the management training program at Dominion Bancshares Corporation.

 

For three years he sold check clearing, loans and other Dominion services to smaller banks in Virginia and West Virginia but didn’t see himself as a numbers man. He liked what he saw of the law. “I would run across lawyers — be in situations where we had to do legal contracts,” he remembers. “That side of the fence intrigued me.”

 

Law might have stayed on that side of the fence if he hadn’t married Julie Dalhouse in June 1982. She was the daughter of the Dominion Bancshares’ chairman, and both worried about charges of nepotism. So they decided to start anew. They moved to Boston, where she had been living for a year since graduating from the University of Virginia with a degree in French. Though Caldwell got a job doing what he’d done before — selling services to small banks — he began to think more broadly about his life and career. “Leaving Roanoke was one of the best things he ever did,” says Julie, noting that her husband is not a risk taker. “It opened up the world to him — that all things could be possible, that he could shape his dreams.”

 

Says Caldwell, “Once I found that I could successfully move from the comfort of home and Virginia to the unknown of a new job where I did not know anyone, it made me comfortable to think about other options — including law school.”

 

After he scored well on the LSAT, he and Julie headed back south so he could study law at Washington & Lee University. “I was a nervous wreck,” Caldwell recalls. “I’d been out of school five and half years, and I didn’t know how I would stand up to the competition of young folks coming right out of school.”

 

He excelled. He was Note and Comment editor on the school’s law review, and graduated first in his class in 1986. During the summer months he had interned at Robinson Bradshaw & Hinson in Charlotte, and the firm’s approach lured him back.

 

“The focus is toward the client and not toward the lawyers competing with one another,” he says. “Individual lawyers on the staff don’t even know the number of hours each of us bills.” The firm also encourages its 120 lawyers to have well-developed personal lives and to be involved in civic life. “It’s an unselfish practice,” Caldwell says.

 

Today he and Julie have two children, son Gray, a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and daughter Lauren, a senior at Myers Park High School. He participates in numerous volunteer activities, including serving on the board of the Lakewood Preschool Cooperative, a child care facility in one of Charlotte’s most fragile neighborhoods. In addition to donating his legal skills, “he’s a very active worker,” says Courtney Alexander, the cooperative’s executive director. “He comes to parents’ events, has come to serve lunch to parents and students, and helps man tables for us.”