Never Say Die

Tom Slater is a gentleman, and he enjoys talking about the 356-acre farm that’s been in his family for nearly 200 years. Just don’t call him a “gentleman farmer.”

“Gentleman farmers are ones who don’t get their hands dirty,” says Slater, who has been working on the farm since childhood. 

Full-time farming, however, was never in his sights. A college professor’s suggestion that he become a “country lawyer” led to a 57-year-and-counting career at Hunton, where he practices antitrust litigation. 

Slater, a past president of the Richmond Bar Association and of Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, has tried more than 70 cases since joining the firm fresh out of law school in 1969. Though he lost the first one, there haven’t been many losses in his career, which has ranged from a murder case to serving as lead counsel for Fortune 100 companies in class action price-fixing cases. 

Slater and his younger brother, Bob, grew up on the farm known as Rose Hill, loading and baling hay and helping raise the award-winning beef cattle they showed in competition. Shorty, Slater’s 1,200-pound shorthorn, won grand champion of all breeds in 1960. But while farming was in Slater’s blood, he knew he was expected to attend college. 

His father, Thomas Sr., had attended Virginia Military Institute, where he held the school’s high-jump equestrian record riding a horse named Jack Knife, Slater says. When the young Slater expressed a desire to go to the University of Virginia, his mother, Hilton, weighed in. “She said, ‘You need VMI,’ and she was right,” says Slater of the rigor VMI provided. After that, he says, “It was easy to become a trial lawyer, because trial lawyers have to work very hard if they’re going to be any good at it.”

At VMI, Slater hoped to be a veterinarian, but a challenging organic chemistry course stood in the way. That’s when a professor suggested he become a “country lawyer.”

A health-related deferment prevented Slater from fulfilling VMI’s military requirement after graduation in 1966, so he enrolled in UVA’s School of Law. In his third year, Slater took a trial practice seminar taught by John Butzner, appointed by Lyndon Johnson to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit. “Spouses sat on the jury,” Slater says of the moot court. “I got to try a case in front of Judge Butzner and learned so much. He emphasized: Keep it simple. Pick no more than five key points and build your case around them. That’s stuck with me all my life.”

At Hunton, Slater put Butzner’s principles into practice. An assortment of cases followed, including one in which Slater represented the former butler of Lewis Powell Sr. (father of the future U.S. Supreme Court justice.) The butler had shot and killed a colleague after an altercation at Prestwould Condominiums, where both men were employed. “A murder case? Good Lord,” Slater says of the pro bono case, which he got dismissed.

It was in the areas of commercial litigation and antitrust that Slater made a name for himself. When the firm’s head of antitrust left to join the Department of Justice for Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, Slater took over. “You talk about on-the-job training,” says Slater. “I was scared to death!”

But he’d loved competition since childhood—whether he was breeding his award-winning cattle or playing football for VMI—and that transferred to the courtroom. “I like to engage,” he says. “If you like people, you like being in front of a jury.”

Brian Riopelle was once opposing counsel in a pharmaceutical patent case. “Tom is excellent in the courtroom. He’s not going to weaken his strong arguments with weak arguments,” says Riopelle. “It was what you hope every single litigation would be. We certainly had differing positions, but there was no game-playing.”

In one instance, they disagreed about producing documents. But they did agree that, if one side were to file a motion, they would tell the other side beforehand. “It was absolutely the most collegial case I think I ever had,” says Riopelle, who likes to share that experience when teaching CLEs.

Of the dozens of cases Slater has handled, he relishes those that were especially complex. In Padgett v. General Motors (1976), Slater successfully represented the corporation, which was being sued by an individual paralyzed after an accident while riding in a GM car with a defective motor mount. “We were put in a difficult position of having to defend the case on only one ground, which was that, while the part was defective, it didn’t cause the accident,” says Slater, adding that the driver and plaintiff had been drinking. “There was a lot of sympathy for the plaintiff, as there should be. But seeing the jury do the right thing makes you feel good about the jury system and our entire legal system.”

In 2005, a plaintiff alleged that companies including TXU Energy had taken advantage of their market position and caused price jumps within the short-term energy market. Slater and his team, repping TXU, invoked a more than century-old canon known as the filed-rate doctrine, which says a lawsuit should be dismissed if a buyer later challenges the filed rate at which it purchased electricity. Judge Janice Jack granted their motion for summary judgment.

“You get a big kick out of taking a case that’s pretty tough and getting a good result,” says Slater, who has twice received the Randolph Williams Award for Outstanding Pro Bono Services as well as the Hunter W. Martin Professionalism Award. “You never say die, you have a winning attitude, and you manage to get a good result for your client. That makes you feel pretty good.”

These days, 82-year-old Slater tries to get “up the road” to Rose Hill as much as possible. It’s in Upperville, approximately 120 miles northwest of Richmond, where Slater and wife Scottie have their primary residence. 

Speaking from his home just before last Thanksgiving, Slater chats about the 22-pound wild turkey he bagged earlier in the season. He prepared it in a vintage L.L. Bean smoker, and the turkey was a featured part of the family’s holiday menu at Rose Hill.

Slater was anticipating doing some chores on the farm, much as he did during his childhood. While there’s a three-cylinder Ford, like the tractors he rode as a teenager, Slater admits he prefers the more modern John Deere “toys,” equipped with air conditioning and stereo. 

Today, Slater goes into the office a couple of times a week and enjoys more time at the farm and with his five children and their families. He is special counsel at the firm and chair emeritus of the litigation, labor and competition practices. 

“You like to be part of something that’s important to the world you’re living in,” says Slater. “You try to do it right, and you try to get the right results, win or lose. That’s what makes me get up every morning.”

Grade A

Although wagyu may be the beef of choice at many high-end eateries, Tom Slater is not a fan. Known for its tenderness and buttery flavor, the beef from Japanese cattle, in Slater’s opinion, is too soft and “mushy” for his tastes.

Having grown up breeding and showing cattle in competition, Slater prefers prime beef from Angus cattle, the kind bred at Rose Hill farm. Angus cattle tend to produce consistently juicy and tender beef. Growing up, Slater and his brother were tasked with feeding the shorthorn, Hereford and Angus steers before school. “We cooked the grain, barley and corn so we’d feed the steers a more digestible blend with carbohydrates to make them fat,” says Slater of the cereal recipe that produced the prize-winners. “Those steers are graded prime plus,” says Slater. “There’s no higher grade in cattle.”