About Jerry Grillo
Jerry Grillo is an award-winning journalist who has written for Newsday, ESPN, Golf Magazine and Atlanta magazine, among others. For 14 years, he was senior and executive editor at Georgia Trend, where he helped transform the magazine into a leading business resource. His book, The Music and Mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton: A Basically True Biography, was published in April 2021 by the University of Georgia Press. A biography of Baseball Hall-of-Famer Johnny Mize is slated for publication by University of Nebraska Press in 2024.
Articles written by Jerry Grillo
The World According to Brent
Brent Barton worked in the White House and state house before following in his father’s footsteps“Fathers and sons,” says Brent Barton. “You know, it could be chess, it could be building a motor together, but sometimes there’s a joint activity by which the father, consciously or not, transmits a lot of important life lessons to the son.” Since Barton is talking about himself and his father, Bill Barton, the legendary plaintiff’s personal injury attorney, with whom he now partners at Barton Trial Attorneys in Newport, you might assume he’s talking about the law. He …
Eye on the Ball
Adam Malone uses what he learned from his famous father to chart his own pathIn 2002, Adam Malone was flying his single-engine Cessna 210 from Atlanta to the Islands, where he planned to join his family on vacation, when he ran into bad weather. “Air traffic control directed me into the storm, saying it was a small buildup and I’d be through it in no time. They were wrong,” he says. “It was severe weather, and it threw me up about 3,000 feet in three seconds; then it threw me down about 4,000 feet in the same amount of time. I’m just bouncing around up …
Helping Juries See the Why
Katherine L. McArthur laser-focuses on the facts of the caseKatherine McArthur has spent much of her 44-year legal career running from failure. And that has made all the difference. “When I get into a case, I never set out thinking, ‘I’m the badass lawyer and I’m going to kick the other side’s rear,’” says McArthur, founder and owner of the McArthur Law Firm in Macon and Atlanta. “I’m more likely to think, ‘How am I going to lose this case?’ Because I’m always running from failure. That’s what keeps me on my toes. I can’t …
A Philosopher and a Warrior
Richard Jaffe keeps people from being executed by the stateRichard Jaffe was working at his father’s auto-parts store in Birmingham, Alabama, on a Sunday morning in 1972 when he saw something that would help make him one of the best criminal defense lawyers in the country. It was the look on his father’s face as Herman Jaffe was hauled away by sheriff’s deputies. Herman Jaffe's auto parts store open on Sundays in defiance of the region’s blue laws. Jaffe’s Auto Parts served a mostly African-American clientele in a neighborhood where the …
Strategies for Businesses To Prevent Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware is a malicious software, also called malware, designed to disable computer systems and capture sensitive data until the victim pays a ransom to recover access. Ransomware attacks are on the rise, and the tools deployed by threat actors — people or groups who intentionally cause harm to digital devices or systems — are increasingly sophisticated. “Assume you're going to get hit at some point,” says Jason Kravitz, head of the cybersecurity and privacy practice at Nixon Peabody …
Back to the Center
Hannibal Heredia is the family law attorney who’s meticulous, well-prepared, and ready to rockFor a long time, whenever Hannibal Heredia introduced himself, he’d invariably get some variation on this response: “So … did you eat his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti?” Heredia would smile and nod, getting the joke for the umpteenth time. Except, initially, he didn’t really get the joke. Yes, he knew about The Silence of the Lambs, but he hadn’t seen it yet, and he knew nothing of Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Heredia was too busy with college, then law school, and his music …
Super Fascinating Lawyers
Our profiler in residence on the people he’s metThere are tons of lawyer jokes out there, and this is one of them: What’s the difference between an accountant and a lawyer? Accountants know they’re boring. Seventeen years ago, that joke almost made me turn down the chance to write for this publication. Writing about lawyers? It sounded rather dull. However, loving a good challenge, and needing a paycheck, I took the gig. Then I kept returning, year after year. And I haven’t met a boring lawyer yet. My first feature was on a Holland …
Poll Position
What Iván Resendiz Gutierrez did during the 2020 electionIván Resendiz Gutierrez could see that the man was agitated and maybe looking for trouble. It was election day 2020 and the polls were minutes away from closing in Las Vegas, where Gutierrez was volunteering as a poll watcher. Nevada was considered a battleground state, which is why Gutierrez wanted to be there. “We thought that if there were going to be any shenanigans, any chance of someone trying to prevent someone else from voting, it would be one of those [battleground] states,” says …
'They All Started Calling'
L. Chris Stewart never anticipated being a civil rights lawyer; now he’s a face of the movementIf you ask L. Chris Stewart how he became one of the nation’s most renowned civil rights attorneys, he says, “That’s a question I ask myself daily, because I really have no clue.” Turns out it began with a phone call from a heartbroken mother in 2014. “She told me her son had been killed by the police and no one would believe her,” says Stewart, CEO of Stewart Miller Simmons Trial Attorneys, the Atlanta firm he launched in 2020. “The truth is, I didn’t want to take the case.” …
Mister Legal Scholar
Don Samuel is the ‘walking legal encyclopedia’ whose cases make headlinesDon Samuel’s long career in criminal defense was launched with a phone call at 11 o’clock one evening in the fall of 1982. It was his managing partner, Ed Garland. “He said some woman had killed her husband down in Griffin and to get down there and not come back until the case was ready for trial,” recalls Samuel, 67, who had joined the Atlanta firm, now called Garland, Samuel & Loeb, on Memorial Day that year, and had, up until then, planned to work in labor law …
Find top lawyers with confidence
The Super Lawyers patented selection process is peer influenced and research driven, selecting the top 5% of attorneys to the Super Lawyers lists each year. We know lawyers and make it easy to connect with them.
Find a lawyer near you