Making His Own Mark

When a long-empty school building nearly burns to the ground, a personal injury attorney typically isn’t among the first people you contact.

“Within a week after the fire [in February 2020], we started getting threatening letters from our insurance carrier, questioning the viability of our claim,” says Rev. Bill Stanfield, a Cooperative Baptist minister and founder and CEO of Metanoia, a community development organization in the under-resourced Chicora-Cherokee neighborhood of North Charleston. The neighborhood included the vacant Chicora Elementary School, which they planned to transform into a vibrant mixed-use community hub. The insurer soon canceled the policy on the dilapidated school, and returned Metanoia’s $100,000 premium check. Unsure where to turn, Stanfield called Mark Joye. 

The two had met just the autumn before. “Mark contacted me out of the blue and explained that he and his wife Becky were looking for a local organization to support,” recalls Stanfield. 

Joye’s office was not far from the impoverished neighborhoods Metanoia serves. His father, Reese Joye, moved his eponymous criminal defense law firm there in 1970, and became a pivotal community leader, helping the then-unincorporated military and industrial area become an independent municipality in 1972. It’s now the third largest city in the state.

Through The Mark and Becky Joye Foundation, the Joyes were looking to increase their charitable investment to those in need. Stanfield invited them to tour Metanoia and some of its projects, including affordable homes the organization had built and the school building. The next day, the Joyes made a donation. 

“It was a nice surprise,” says Stanfield. “I certainly wasn’t expecting a six-figure gift.” That initial donation in 2019 became the first of many, and was the impetus for an ongoing Spark Joye Matching Gift campaign.

Then the fire engulfed the long-vacant 1930s-era school. “We had raised funds and were about to start construction when the fire gutted it,” Stanfield says. “The insurance company was telling us that we didn’t have a leg to stand on. Mark was the opposite, he was encouraging. He brought a fighting spirit.” 

Thanks to Joye’s pro bono guidance—during what turned into a 3 ½-year case entailing three mediations—Metanoia prevailed, winning an undisclosed but substantial settlement. The nonprofit finally broke ground on the school renovation project this January. 

“This was the most satisfying settlement I’ve had in my entire practice,” Joye says. 

Community service and fighting spirit are Joye hallmarks. “Mark has his dad’s DNA,” says Roger Young Sr., a judge for the 9th Circuit who knew Reese well, and has worked with Mark since he passed the bar in 1989. 

“Reese was an outstanding lawyer, known and respected across the state for being a dogged and effective DUI defense attorney,” Young continues. “He had an ego, but he could back it up. Mark also has the very healthy belief that he’s the best person to represent his client. And he’s proven he can do it, just as his dad did. Their confidence is bolstered by experience. It comes from having done it, and having success.” 

Thanks to that confidence, the firm that Joye and Ken Harrell took over from Reese in the 1990s has grown substantially. Photos of Joye and Harrell are ubiquitous on TV ads and billboards, carrying on yet another of Reese’s legacies. 

“Dad was one of the first defense lawyers to advertise on TV to build his civil personal injury practice. That was when I was in high school,” Joye says with a laugh. “I caught a lot of grief.”

That ambition, however, continues through the younger Joye. “Kenny and I talked about expansion from the outset,” says Joye, who practiced alongside his father until Reese’s death in 2008. Then the firm had six associates. Now, he and Harrell manage a team of about 25 attorneys. 

In his younger days, Joye didn’t intend to join his father’s practice; he wasn’t even sure he wanted to pursue law. As a young boy growing up in Mount Pleasant, he loved sports and being outdoors, hunting and fishing. “Which you could basically do back then right in our neighborhood,” Joye says of Old Hobcaw along the Wando River, a relatively unpopulated area where he’d duck hunt in Hobcaw Creek. 

Joye inherited his love of the outdoors from his father, a devoted scoutmaster who had grown up in rural Bennettsville, and earned a mechanical engineering degree before going to law school. “He could take apart anything and put it back together,” Joye recalls. “That’s what I’d do as a kid: Dad would take me down to his work bench if the blender or something had broken. We didn’t go out and buy a new one. He would tinker until he fixed it.” 

After the poli-sci major graduated from Charleston’s Porter-Gaud School and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Joye took a year and a half to travel and teach in West Germany before deciding to study law. “I’m glad I didn’t pigeonhole myself,” says Joye, who still loves to travel with Becky; their son Mason, 30; daughter Eliza, 28, a criminal defense lawyer like her grandad; and son Finn, 14. “I took a range of classes, which taught me early on that chemistry was not for me. But I loved my public speaking class and did well.” 

It was the first glimmer that law, especially trial work, might be a good fit. Reese “lived and breathed law, 24/7,” Joye recalls. “But my dad was so well known and such a rockstar. I wanted to establish my own identity, not just be known as Reese’s son.”  

Joye was born while his dad was in law school and his parents lived in University of South Carolina’s married student housing. The younger returned to those same stomping grounds to complete his law degree, then worked with Clawson & Staubes, where he did insurance defense work. Harrell, who finished law school a year before Joye, was doing insurance defense work, too, focusing on workers’ comp cases at Nelson & Mullins. The two became close friends through a lawyers’ softball league. 

“We thought of ourselves as athletes,” says Joye, a former high school football star. “Kenny and I were thick as thieves, along with my law school roommate Jay McDonald, and we talked about how we were both getting disillusioned representing corporations and insurance companies. For me, it was neither motivating nor fulfilling.” 

Adds Harrell: “Having grown up in a blue-collar family in eastern Virginia, I did not want to represent BP oil for the rest of my career.”

At about the same time, Reese was considering expanding his DUI practice into personal injury. Mark joined him in 1992, with Harrell coming roughly a year later. In 1997, the duo bought the practice, based in the same 1970s office building on Rivers Avenue where Mark used to mow the lawn as a kid. 

“Reese sketched out an agreement on the back of a cocktail napkin,” Harrell recalls, “and had only one stipulation: that we keep the Joye Law Firm name.” That was an easy yes for Harrell, now the managing partner. “I mean, is there a more marketable name?”

In 1997, the Jimenez family came to Joye, desperate and devastated. Their 6 year-old son, Sergio, died after his mother’s 1985 Dodge minivan was hit by a Honda Civic going only 5 miles per hour. The van was making a turn at an intersection when the collision occurred, causing the rear gate latch to open. There was no damage to the Civic, but little Sergio, who had unfastened his seatbelt to grab some gum, was tossed out the rear hatch and fractured his skull. At first it seemed like a straightforward auto accident case. But one evening, when Joye was at home with his young son on his lap, watching an Inside Edition segment about a defective car door latch in Florida, he put two and two together. 

“I didn’t know squat about product liability, but I immediately called the folks in Florida and compared notes,” Joye says. “Before I knew it, I was traveling around the country taking depositions.”

What Joye eventually brought to light was a safety defect in Chrysler vehicles—one that would cost no more than 25 cents each to fix, yet contributed to the deaths of at least 30 people and injured more than a hundred. Taking on a corporate behemoth like Chrysler, in the largest case he’d ever tried, however, was more than Joye’s six-person firm could handle. So they joined forces with a larger firm in Washington, D.C. 

“It was a team effort, but there’s no doubt that Mark was the lead dog,” says Harrell. The jury foreman, a retired marine corporal, sat stone-faced throughout the weeks-long trial, he recalls. “We weren’t sure we’d cracked that nut. But it turns out his stern face 

was reserved for the other side. He was so angry about the evidence we presented and the terrible safety defect that the company knew about.” 

That jury returned the largest product liability verdict ever, at the time, against a U.S. manufacturer: $262.5 million. 

“That case certainly put Mark and Joye Law Firm on the map, but since then his work has been every bit as impressive,” Harrell says. 

The list of headline-worthy settlements is extensive. “The insurance companies know who Mark is, and if he’s bringing the case, they prefer to resolve it outside of court,” says Jay McDonald, a defense attorney at Clawson & Staubes. 

Harrell admires his partner’s competitive streak, both in the courtroom and on the field. He recalls a time when Joye was playing outfield in a softball game and dove to make a catch, injuring his hand. “It was all swollen and he was unsure if he should bat, but did anyway. He hits the ball, then lets out the most god-awful scream,” Harrell recalls. An X-ray showed multiple broken bones, but that’s the price when the stakes are high. 

“We were a juggernaut there for a while—league champions for several years running,” Harrell says. 

Competitiveness aside, Joye says the practice of law is about helping people in need more than anything. 

“I was an Eagle Scout, as was my dad and my brother. Helping others is the Scout code. My dad and scouting drummed into me that it’s my duty to help others less fortunate,” Joye says. Doing plaintiffs’ work fits this mindset, he adds. “I get to help people out of a jam. They are often at their wit’s end. Nobody comes to see a lawyer when good things are happening. I feel it’s an honor and a privilege when someone asks me for help. That’s my motivation to keep going.”  

McDonald, who’s known Joye since sixth grade, has a personal reason for appreciating his friend’s compassion. “Mark saved my life,” he says. McDonald was also on the softball team, and would join Harrell and Joye on “infamous baseball trips,” visiting iconic stadiums around the country. “We had a blast. There was some fun, but unfortunately for me, beyond my time with them, the fun became a disease,” he says. As McDonald’s drinking became more serious, Joye stepped in and orchestrated an intervention.

“Now every year on the anniversary of that intervention I get a call from Jay saying, ‘Thank you for saving my life,’” Joye says, adding that McDonald gifted him his recovery coin. “Whatever legal accomplishments I have achieved in my profession pale in comparison.”

The two now travel around the state on behalf of Lawyers Helping Lawyers, speaking with other attorneys about how to recognize and respond when a colleague is in crisis. “That’s an important part of Jay’s continuing recovery and it’s important for me because I feel lawyers need a lot of help,” Joye adds. 

“Lawyers are great at helping others out of a jam, but not so great at helping themselves,” says McDonald, citing the high prevalence of substance abuse and mental health issues in the profession. “We talk about the importance of taking care of themselves and seeking help when needed—about understanding that the practice of life is more important than the practice of law.” 

It’s an issue that hits close to home for both of them. “Mark gets very emotional about it,” McDonald says. “We’ve both lost colleagues to this disease and to suicide. And I would be one of them if not for Mark. I have so much respect for Mark professionally, as I’m the one often going up against him in court. Sure, he’s undeniably a great lawyer. But he’s a way better person.”