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
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 Kind of Entity Will You Be?’
And other important questions for business startupsYou’ve got a great idea about launching a line of cosmetic products or a craft brewery. What are the first steps to make it a reality? “Get a good attorney, a good CPA and a good insurance agent,” says Scott Schulten, a business/corporate attorney at Schulten Ward Turner & Weiss in Atlanta. “Those are the three people you need most when you start a business. Because no matter what you do, you run the risk of messing up, and those are the people that can protect you.” Whenever a …
Data Entry
What should companies do in an age of cyberattacks?When 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 …
The Legal Advantages and Disadvantages of Managing a Remote Workforce
Data privacy and cybersecurity lawyers have a name for a common type of breach they handle on behalf of businesses: "Coffeehouse cases," meaning "it’s something we’ve run into with remote-employee situations,” says James 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, sit down, flip open the laptop, log in. It might be an encrypted computer, but you …
‘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 …
Brave New Workplace
The legal advantages and disadvantages of managing a remote workforceJames 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 …
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 …
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