About Carol Clark
Articles written by Carol Clark
Looking for the Union Label
Jeffrey Mintz defends companies and collects labor historyThe pictures hanging in the lobby of the Atlanta office of Jackson Lewis tell a story. One black-and-white photo, dated 1914, shows four solemn, barefoot boys lined up against a brick wall near Atlanta’s Fulton Bag and Cotton Mills. Their pay, according to the caption, ranged from 32 to 50 cents per week. “The mill owners could get away with it back then because there weren’t any labor laws,” says Jeffrey Mintz, managing partner of the Atlanta office for Jackson Lewis. The firm has …
No Man is an Island
Sea Islander Cal Smith is anything but isolatedWilliam Calvin “Cal” Smith III prepped for his legal career by flipping burgers, hauling nets on a shrimp boat, interning at the White House and traveling around the country as an advance man for Vice President Dan Quayle. The kicker? He did it all before he turned 25. “You’ve got to learn to communicate,” he says. “A transactional lawyer, especially, needs to be a real-world person, someone who is at ease with all kinds of people, in order to negotiate the best bottom-line …
Unforgettable
Whether representing Fortune 500 companies or mentoring young lawyers, W. Ray Persons has the debonair, confident presence of a Nat King ColeThe expansive view from W. Ray Persons’ 36th-floor corner office is not one he could have glimpsed growing up in a small town in the segregated South. The floor-to-ceiling windows allow Persons, a partner at King & Spalding, to look out on the adjacent skyscrapers of downtown Atlanta, the lush greenery of Piedmont Park, and, 20 miles to the east, the silhouette of Stone Mountain—the Georgia landmark where the Ku Klux Klan reorganized after the Civil War. Persons, whose practice …
Swimming with Sharks
Amid the staid, legal atmosphere of Robert Sparks Highsmith Jr.’s office on the 20th floor of Atlanta’s One Atlantic Center — brown carpet, law books, a framed photograph of former President George H.W. and first lady Barbara Bush — one object on his desk stands out: a purple plastic Easter egg, decorated with yellow-paper hair, googly eyes and a fuzzy pink nose. “Bates, my almost-4-year-old, constructed this,” says Highsmith, proudly holding up the egg for better viewing. …
L. Lin Wood Fact-Checks the Media
Atlanta is home to both CNN founder Ted Turner, the father of the 24/7 news cycle, and L. Lin Wood, the lawyer who has built a national reputation around taming the relentless beast spawned by that cycle. The two men have a lot in common: They both are controversial and brash, possess outsized egos and are not afraid to enter uncharted territory. But while Turner has been called “the mouth of the South,” because of his habit of making outrageous off-the-cuff remarks, Wood is a …
Henry Perlowski Fits In
The law firm of Arnall Golden Gregory recently moved into the upper reaches of a new Atlanta skyscraper, and its spacious offices are decorated in beiges and creams — an elegant backdrop for the bold splashes of color in its collection of abstract paintings. “The firm is well known for its art,” explains Henry Perlowski, an employment law partner in the firm’s Litigation Practice Group, who knows better than most of us how much appearances matter. “We have some fairly significant …
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