About Beth Taylor
Beth Taylor was a senior editor for Super Lawyers for more than 20 years, and has won dozens of awards for headline-writing and editing throughout her career. Previously, she was an editor and covered courts for The Orlando Sentinel. She also worked for go2net and KIRO-TV in Seattle, where she wrote for and edited their websites. In addition, Beth edited The Kitsap Business Journal and Media Inc. Beth has written travel books, including Around Seattle With Kids for Fodor’s and Seattle Day By Day for Frommer’s, and online travel guides for Google. Her travel writing has appeared in publications including the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle. Beth has a B.A. in communications/journalism and a master’s degree in political science.
Articles written by Beth Taylor
From the Barre to the Bar
Rebecca A. Nitkin traded in her pointe shoes for a criminal defense practiceRecently a man walked into a house where a woman was home alone, then started talking crazy about black magic and computer chips in his head. The terrified woman fled and contacted police. Rebecca A. Nitkin was outraged—about the first-degree burglary charge against her client. “It’s one of the worst charges,” she says, “because it’s somebody breaking and entering into your home with the intent to commit a violent crime.” All the man was guilty of, Nitkin argued, was going off his …
The Candy Man’s Lawyer
John R. Climaco helped Sammy Davis Jr. battle financial failures, negotiated with Cesar Chavez on behalf of the Teamsters union, and took on the tobacco industryQ: Your clients have ranged from Sammy Davis Jr. to Liza Minnelli to the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Tell me about working with these celebrities. A: I began representing Sammy in the mid-’70s—met him through a friend named Richard Wayman, who had formed the Highway Safety Foundation. Sammy was interested in highway safety as a result of an accident between Las Vegas and Los Angeles where he lost his eye. Sy [Marsh] used to be Sammy’s agent. They subsequently …
Anything You Can Do, She Can Do Better
Vicki L. Gilliam holds her own fighting for clients like Brandy Nicole Williams and the Ramapough TribeVicki L. Gilliam, like most of us, doesn’t particularly like getting up and going to an office building. So she came up with an ingenuous solution: She simply doesn’t have one. The idea to have her firm’s employees work remotely formed when one of her paralegals moved to Memphis. “In five minutes, my tech guy was able to connect her into our server,” says Gilliam. Then came the roadwork that dragged on for months. “People couldn’t even get into the office. I had to drive around …
Lawyer, Heal Thy Doctor
Oklahoma City’s Linda Scoggins is just what the doctor ordered for her health-care industry clienteleQ: What field of law did you start out in? A: Litigation support, as most associates did in the early ’80s, because there was a lot going on in Oklahoma. That was the time of the oil bust. The boom was still going on in ’81, and then in ’82 there was the bust. The Penn Square Bank failed in ’82. There was just an unbelievable amount of litigation. Nearly all new associates were thrown into the fire of litigation. To give you an idea of how the legal profession was booming at that time, …
A Damon Runyon Kind of Practice
Judd Burstein is mum on Fox News, but not on the mob or Don KingWhen Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman died in February of an apparent drug overdose, his body was found by close friend David Bar Katz. A few days later, The National Enquirer ran an article claiming that Katz and Hoffman were lovers, that Katz had often seen Hoffman using heroin, and that he witnessed Hoffman freebase cocaine the night before his death. All of this was attributed to David Bar Katz. The problem: Katz never spoke with the Enquirer. Judd Burstein, Katz’s lawyer, …
The Real Lyon
Mesquite personal injury lawyer Ted Lyon has set his sights on the Koch brothers, the Texas prison system and, lately, on marauding packs of wolvesQ: Tell me about the roots of your work ethic. A: I grew up in East Texas, outside the town of Terrell, on a family farm, hunting and fishing, running through the woods. I had a really great high school education in a small town and a really great time growing up. There were eight kids in our family: a good Catholic family. We had cattle, we had sheep, we basically raised all our own meat. We had chickens and we had pigs. We had a big garden, a huge garden; and then we had a huge yard. We used …
Roads to Resolution
Victor Schachter on launching mediation centers in emerging democracies around the worldFifty years ago, Victor Schachter stood in the center of a dry, dusty village outside Bangalore, India, dressing wounds, applying ointment and dispensing medication to a dozen or so people waiting in line every morning. Today, as president of the Foundation for Sustainable Rule of Law Initiatives (FSRI), he offers a different kind of assistance. Schachter launched FSRI in 2012 to help create mediation centers in emerging democracies, including India, where cases now settle at the extraordinary …
Chaos Theory
How Kurt Melchior, who escaped Nazi Germany at 13, metamorphosed into a business litigatorQ: I understand you weren’t born in this country. A: I was a refugee. I’m Jewish, although I’m not an observing Jew. My family lived in Germany. One of my relatives once did some research and determined we’d been there 500 years at least. And then the Nazis came in. When [my dad] was in college in Germany, he had a fraternity brother, and the fraternity brother was gay. Years later, the fraternity brother was a dentist in a small town. He was also Jewish, and was in a gay relationship. …
The Good Foot Soldier
David Goodnight’s client list ranges from Amazon to Monsanto to a Napa Valley vineyard—and in his spare time, the Stoel Rives litigator helps Burundian widows rebuild their livesQ: What was it like growing up in the Seattle area? A: I spent a lot of time in the mountains and North Cascades hiking, and a lot of time in the outdoors kayaking. It was wonderful. My dad was disabled, so my uncle would take me up into the mountains, take me deer hunting, hiking, and was just very kind and generous. Q: And you’ve stayed put. A: I think the Bar, the King County Court, and our federal judges are wonderful. The Bar is relatively small and friendly. It's a comfortable …
Kay Wolf: It's the People
The Orlando employment defense attorney spends her spare time bringing educational opportunities to kids in CambodiaQ: What is the most difficult part of being an employment defense attorney? A: The hardest thing … is when a company is on hard times—and, of course, there’s been a lot of this in the last few years—and they have to lay off good employees. The issue of firing somebody that has not done their job, that’s pretty easy for me. [But]I went through a [client’s] layoff here locally, for example, with Lockheed Martin, back in the early ’90s. They went from 17,000 employees to about 3,500. …
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