In No One’s Shadow

It was a December day, but despite the chill, a trickle of perspiration dripped from the lawyer’s brow. He was being interviewed by a television reporter at a 2018 hearing for Jesse Osborne, the 16 year-old charged and convicted in the Townville school shooting case. Asked to identify himself, the attorney said, “I’m Frank Eppes, and I’m the biggest lawyer in South Carolina.”

It’s not hyperbole.

At 6 feet 10 inches and nearly 400 pounds, Frank L. Eppes is, frankly, big. As is his reputation, intellect, compassion, generosity, sense of humor, and maybe biggest of all, his name.

A Frank Eppes has been a member of the South Carolina bar since 1909, when his grandfather, J. Frank Eppes, a gentleman farmer and trial lawyer, graduated as class orator of University of South Carolina School of Law. He was followed by Eppes’ late father, Frank Eppes, who served as a distinguished circuit court judge in Greenville County for 38 years. 

“I’m a courthouse junkie. I grew up thinking the county courthouse was the greatest place on earth,” says Eppes, who is neither a junior nor third because of slight variations in each of their full names. “I can remember taking naps in the jail cell at age 3.” 

“But no one here just sees Frank simply as Judge Eppes’ son,” says longtime friend and colleague John Nichols. “They know he made his own way. Have you seen him?” he adds with a laugh. “At his size, he doesn’t stand in anyone’s shadow. For many it could be tricky to live up to such a legacy, but not for Frank. For him it’s been an experience of love.” 

Take the ongoing, decades-long and much-covered case of Charles Wakefield. In 1975, Wakefield was charged with a double murder in Greenville. The victims were the county’s top narcotics agent, Lt. Frank Looper, and Looper’s father. The case came before Judge Eppes who, upon the jury’s guilty verdict, sentenced 21-year-old Wakefield to the electric chair. He spent two years on death row and, after the U.S. Supreme Court declared South Carolina’s death-penalty law unconstitutional in 1978, another 33 years in prison cells without a single demerit.

In 2010, Wakefield was released on parole thanks to the efforts of many people, including Eppes. In the early 2000s, the son was asked to work on the case, aiming to reverse the sentence his father issued decades before. “My daddy got sick in 2001 and died in 2002, but we talked about it and I told him I was going to try to get Wakefield out,” says Eppes. “He said, ‘Good.’ My father wasn’t real big on life sentences.”

Given new evidence and the uncovering of mishandled and missing documents, and the fact that the deceased’s last surviving family member feeling he served enough time, Eppes the younger feels his client has been vindicated, and that his father would be proud. “My dad sentenced two people to the death penalty, and always said he was glad that neither was ever executed.”

Despite his family’s legal legacy, Eppes never felt any pressure to pursue a career in law. “My dad never counseled me on anything,” he says. “The only thing he ever pushed me to do was to at least apply to Washington and Lee.” Which he did, earning an academic scholarship.

When the basketball coach spotted Eppes on campus, his eyes lit up. “Son, you’re tall. Do you do what the coach says?” he asked. 

Eppes had played at Traveler’s Rest High School, so he decided to join the squad. “I was a mediocre athlete at a small college, but I loved it,” he recalls. At the end of his last season, Eppes recalls the coach saying, “‘I’d never had anybody work harder or improve more,’ which is exactly what my high school coach had told me. Good Lord, I must have been terrible!”

Eppes continues to be a slam dunk when it comes to persistence and effort, both on the court and inside one. “What basketball taught me is that if you fail, you get back up and do it again. You keep practicing till you get better. I love the game—I love getting into that rhythm, an almost unconscious sense of flow,” says Eppes. “In law I can get to that same place. When you see the path to a solution for your client, it’s a glorious thing.”

While basketball was a challenge, academics came more easily to him. After graduating with honors from W&L, Eppes found law school at the University of South Carolina to be both a breeze and a blast. He embraced Columbia’s social scene, so much so that a classmate’s parent  once called Judge Eppes out of concern that his son’s grades might suffer.  

“My father told them, ‘I think he’ll be OK. Frank’s always been good at reading and writing,’” says Eppes, the only one of the four children to pursue law. He finished first in his class. 

“I think Frank’s maybe the only person, or close to it, while I was there, to have close to a perfect 4.0 at USC law school,” says Nichols, a fellow Gamecock. “I’m just glad I was the year behind him—my class rank would have suffered even more.”  

That academic prowess earned Eppes a clerkship with Judge Robert F. Chapman of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, as well as an offer from a top New York firm that he worked for over a summer. He thought he’d spend maybe one year in the Big Apple; he ended up staying 10. 

“I loved New York—it was fun and fast paced. But I always knew I’d come back,” says Eppes, whose tenure at New York’s Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton primarily entailed multistate litigation, business disputes and product liability. “I was mostly helping rich people and corporations. All I ever wanted was to live and work here in Greenville and Travelers Rest. I feel I can make a difference for my clients here and help people who really need it.”

Upon returning in 1997, Eppes entertained attractive offers from established firms, but opted instead to revisit an idea hatched in law school with Lee Plumblee, a friend since the two were first graders in 1967. The two founded Eppes & Plumblee, starting from scratch with a couple of folding chairs and folding tables, a few computers and a secretary—the only one earning a paycheck. 

Today their firm remains intentionally small: two partners, two associates, two paralegals and three paralegals, though they’ve graduated to sturdier office furniture. Their practice areas include criminal and civil defense and appeals, as well as business and commercial litigation, securities violations and personal injury. For Eppes, the latter includes injury of the quartzite variety, or rather, defending a client charged with injuring a certain famous South Carolina stone. 

“I take the South Carolina-Clemson rivalry more seriously than about anyone. It was an important event in our family,” says Eppes, estimating he’s been to about 48 Tigers vs. Gamecocks football games over the years—every one since 1989. Despite that, in 2013 he represented the 18-year-old charged with malicious injury and grand larceny after allegedly vandalizing the rock at Clemson’s Memorial Stadium.

The prosecution argued that the good-luck totem named in honor of Coach Frank Howard (who had been a good friend of Judge Eppes) could be worth nearly $134,000 if broken nuggets were sold on the open market. Eppes countered that the missing brick-size piece didn’t keep players from rubbing the rock for good luck, thus its worth had not been diminished. 

During the four-day trial, Eppes squeezed in a little dance routine involving a pickaxe and brick to demonstrate inconsistencies in a witness’ testimony. That creative choreography helped win his client’s acquittal on the more serious charge, leading to conviction on a misdemeanor that has since been expunged. “It was a great victory,” says Eppes, who enjoyed four days of “chewing up the courtroom, knowing if we lost my client wasn’t going to jail. … The Howard’s Rock trial was my most fun trial to date.”

Other cases, including the pending Wakefield and Osborne cases, are much more serious, but central to what drives Eppes. “I simply try to get best results for my clients. I’m very persistent—heck, most prosecutors will tell you I’m a pain in the ass,” says Eppes, who describes himself as more a plea lawyer than trial lawyer. “I spend a lot of time finding creative ways to resolve cases, because to me the risks of going before a jury are too high in most situations. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I counsel clients to take a deal, and my best trial work happens only because my clients don’t take my advice and decide to exercise their right to a jury trial.”

To wit: a recent client who was facing life without parole. “Through a miracle, we got a mistrial and I was able to get him an offer he can stand,” says Eppes. “I was glad for the good result, but I’d told him every day to take the plea.” 

Many clients, Eppes finds, land on the wrong side of the law due to mental health or substance abuse issues. In those cases, he says, empathy and human kindness are often as important as legal guidance. “I was fortunate to grow up in a home where my mother and father could generally find some good in everybody,” says Eppes, who tries to do the same. 

“People in the margins can be hard to protect, often incapable of helping themselves without going to rehab or getting the mental health treatment they need. I had one client who was almost catatonic, and I nursed his case along until he was getting the treatment he needed. Eventually he recovered, got a job, and now has a family and lives a good life. Arrogantly or not, I think, if not for me believing in him, he would likely have gone to the penitentiary.”

Another former client who has recovered from alcoholism called Eppes this past Christmas to say, “I always think of you this time of year, you saved my life. Thank you.” 

“Those are the victories I’m most proud of,” Eppes says.

“I’ve always looked up to Frank, literally and figuratively.” —South Carolina Supreme Court Justice Garrison Hill

“Frank is carrying forth his father’s legacy,” says Nichols. “Judge Eppes was a legend in the community. He had a real sense of justice. He would do things to help people, just as Frank does.”

Nichols recalls working on a train derailment case with Eppes in which the two tried unsuccessfully to win damages in federal court for those who lost their homes after a Norfolk Southern train collided near a plant in 2005. It was transporting chlorine and other hazardous substances and derailed in Graniteville, resulting in nine fatalities, some 250 injuries and more than 5,400 residents being displaced from their homes. “We tried to stretch the railroad’s liability to those who lost their home,” Nichols explains. “Frank pulled me into that case knowing it would be a very hard, long shot, but it didn’t discourage him. He knew they needed that long shot; he saw what happened to these people.” 

The threads of justice in this work can be lengthy and tangled—unlike the crime shows he enjoys watching with his 10-year-old son (“Unlike real life, you can figure things out,” he says)—but that doesn’t faze Eppes. 

“Frank is brilliant at law, but also brilliant with people. I’ve always looked up to Frank, literally and figuratively,” says South Carolina Supreme Court Justice Garrison Hill, who grew up with Eppes in Greenville County, where their fathers had been contemporaries.

“Frank has used his tremendous legal skills to help more people than any other lawyer around, and never wants the credit or limelight. That comes from his passion for justice,” Hill continues. “What makes him so remarkably effective is that he’s as straight as 6 o’clock, his command of law is so complete that he can cut to the root of any problem, and his sense of honor and fairness is so acute that he can see how that problem can be best resolved in the best interest of his client. The only thing that’s got more horsepower than Frank’s brain is his heart.”