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 Legal Advantages and Disadvantages of Managing a Remote Workforce
James 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 …
South Toward Home
Philip Kaplan makes legal history in Little RockIf Philip Kaplan was scared, he did a damn good job of hiding it. That’s how Jack Holt Jr. remembers it anyway. Kaplan and Holt, two Arkansas lawyers, were almost a year into an investigation of the state’s brutal and segregated prison system—profiled in Time magazine in 1968 under the headline “Prisons: Hell in Arkansas”—when, at Cummins State Farm, in barracks designed for 80 men but holding 140, a group of black prisoners took white guards hostage in November 1970. “The …
Building on the Groundwork
The generation who came along five years after John Lewis and Diane Nash on the progress we’ve made ... and haven’tThere’s a reason Atlanta is called “The Cradle of the Civil Rights Movement.” It was headquarters for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It had—and has—the largest system of historically black colleges and universities in the U.S. It is the birthplace of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And for many young black professionals in the late 1960s and early ’70s, it was the place to be. “We recognized the advantages of …
A Firm of One
It’s just Mark Chinn—and softwareTwenty years ago, while the rest of the world was sleeping, Mark Chinn struggled with fits of anxiety. “I’d wake up at 3 a.m., as if a little man had crawled on my shoulder to tell me I forgot something,” says Chinn, 63, a divorce lawyer and the only employee of Chinn & Associates in Jackson, Mississippi. Inevitably, his wife, Cathy, would wake up to see him pulling on his jeans in the wee hours and ask what he was up to. “I didn’t really have an answer for her. I only knew that …
The $500 Million Man
Saying “I’ll see you in court” to Pete Law is probably not the best way to start the dayThe coincidence of name and career are just that, a coincidence, and one Peter A. Law is reminded of on a routine basis. He’s cool with that. “Every time someone walks in, I hear what a great name I have,” Law says. “I used to hear about it in law school, because the professors would always say, ‘Where’s Mr. Law? I understand we have the law in our classroom.’ Really, it doesn’t get old. It’s like an icebreaker.” But he didn’t become a lawyer because of his name; he became …
The Best Lawyer Bobby Lee Cook Has Seen
What criminal defense attorney Steve Sadow knows can acquit youSteve Sadow was 11 when the idea hit him with life-defining force during commercial breaks for an old black-and-white TV show, The Defenders, starring E.G. Marshall. “I turned to my father and said, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to be a criminal defense lawyer,’” says Sadow, 60. It was all he ever wanted to do. It’s all he’s done. “I’ve never been a prosecutor,” Sadow says. “I’ve never handled a contract case. I know nothing about civil law; I don’t even venture a …
A Miracle in Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico
The American Immigration Lawyers Association comes to the aid of families targeted for deportationOver the course of several months last year, the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) engineered a massive pro bono showdown in the high desert, bringing hope and freedom to hundreds of marginalized people. “It was a bit of a miracle in the middle of nowhere,” says Philip Smith, an immigration attorney, AILA member and partner at Nelson Smith in Portland, Oregon. That’s what the lawyers who worked on the Artesia Pro Bono Project called the place: Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico. …
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