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
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 …
What Should Georgia Companies Do to Prevent Cyberattacks?
Advice from business/corporate legal professionalsWhen it comes to cybercrime, Atlanta has been a veritable Gotham City—with nary a Batman in sight. Atlanta has seen: A Home Depot data breach in 2014 that affected more than 50 million cardholders Repeated cyber-attacks on defense contractor Lockheed Martin (foreign espionage is suspected) A data breach at credit-reporting giant Equifax that affected almost 150 million A 2015 apology from then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp after his office released the personal information of 6 million voters …
The Legal Advantages and Disadvantages of Managing a Remote Workforce
Welcome to the Brave New WorkplaceJames Giszczak and his colleagues in data privacy and cybersecurity have a name for a frequent type of breach they handle on behalf of businesses: “coffeehouse cases.” “It’s something we’ve run into with remote-employee situations,” says Giszczak, co-chair of the data privacy and cybersecurity group at McDonald Hopkins in Detroit. “The employee decides to do some work at the coffeehouse. You know: You place your order, you sit down, flip open the laptop, log in. It might be an …
‘We Don’t Let Girl Lawyers Practice Up Here’
An oral history of women who persevered against sexism and discrimination to remake the legal professionIt wasn’t easy. The women in this feature entered the male-dominated legal profession in the 1970s and began changing its demographics. Here are some of the things they heard along the way: “Are you here to find a husband?” “We don’t let girl lawyers practice up here.” “Oh, you’re just a woman.” But there was also this: “You can make it, you can make it.” “These women blazed a trail, facing challenges I can’t imagine dealing …
The Professor
Chilton Davis Varner lives for teachable momentsApril 1992, Rita Meenach was driving her sister’s 1990 Cadillac Seville, heading west on I-64 near Owingsville, Kentucky, when she had a seizure and lost consciousness. Her mother, in the front passenger seat, steered the car off the road. It rolled over a ditch, up a bumpy embankment, and plowed through a thicket of young pines before knocking over a fence, where it finally stopped. Meenach was still unconscious minutes later when the fire started—smoke and flames surging from under the …
Last Will, New Testament
The search for the story behind the will that set Terry Franklin’s ancestors freeThe most meaningful search in Terry Franklin’s life began at a family reunion in Chicago in 2001. “One of my relatives had typed up—using a cursive font, to create the impression of something handwritten—an excerpt from the will ... emancipating my fourth-great grandmother, Lucy Sutton,” says Franklin, 54, an estate and trust litigator at Sacks, Glazier, Franklin & Lodise in Los Angeles. Not just emancipating her, either. In that will, dated January 1846, John Sutton, a white …
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