About Nancy Henderson
Nancy Henderson is an award-winning journalist who has published hundreds of articles in Smithsonian, The New York Times, Parade, The Wall Street Journal and other publications. The author of Sewing Hope and Able! How One Company’s Extraordinary Workforce Changed the Way We Look at Disability Today, she enjoys breaking stereotypes and often writes about people who are making a difference through their work. Over the years, she’s enjoyed listening to family stories about her grandfather, who prosecuted cases as a solicitor general in North Carolina long before she was born.
Articles written by Nancy Henderson
‘A Tremendous Ability to Do Good’
A Christmas epiphany led Doucet & Associates to help people avoid evictionTroy Doucet was opening gifts with his family on Christmas Day 2013 when he felt compelled to do more. “I’ve always been focused on trying to do the right thing,” says the founder of Doucet & Associates, a small foreclosure defense and consumer protection firm in Dublin, Ohio. “I thought more about it during that day and said, ‘Maybe there’s something I can do that both gives back but also maximizes my personal abilities.’” In February 2014, Doucet, now 36, a former mortgage …
The Last Word
Memphis lawyer Bruce McMullen connects with juries—and helped bring the Grizzlies to townBruce McMullen was nervous—and, as usual, over-prepared. Despite his associate status at Thomason Hendrix in Memphis, he was serving as lead counsel on his first medical malpractice trial, a position generally reserved for partners. During the weeklong court proceedings in 2002, as he defended a doctor accused of failing to diagnose a kidney condition that led to a patient’s death, McMullen relied on what would become his “secret sauce”—the ability to relate to jurors from all types …
Half a Century and Counting
An oral history of attorneys who have been practicing since the 1950sFor a handful of Missouri and Kansas attorneys, the evolution of the legal profession isn’t something to be studied—it’s something they’ve lived through. Crank-style mimeographs and carbon-copy letters have given way to email and instant messages. The practice of law has become more complicated, forcing many to specialize after cutting their teeth as generalists. And female and minority colleagues, once rare, now make up a sizeable percentage of the office population. These veteran …
Last Gladiator Standing
Civil rights and employment attorney Deborah L. Gordon gets in the pitDeborah L. Gordon doesn’t remember every detail of her first discrimination hearing 40 years ago. At the time, she was a fresh-out-of-law-school assistant in the civil rights and civil liberties division of the Michigan attorney general’s office. But she distinctly recalls the administrative law judge’s point-blank declaration about her goal to become a litigator: “Women will never be able to get into the pit to fight things out.” Her reply? “You are so wrong.” Then Gordon won the …
Convicted Until Proven Innocent
California Western School of Law’s Innocence Project tries to ‘put Humpty Dumpty back together’ to free the wrongfully imprisonedJustin Brooks was working as a law professor in Michigan 20 years ago when he read about a young woman sentenced to death in a plea bargain in a murder case. Baffled, he met with the inmate, who said her lawyer had advised her that taking the plea would save her life. She also insisted she was innocent. “I was teaching a criminal law class and told my students, ‘There’s a 21-year-old on death row in Illinois who says she’s innocent. Who wants to help me out?’” recalls Brooks, 49. …
Steady She Is
Marlene Eskind Moses guides clients through the toughest family law strugglesWhen Marlene Eskind Moses saw her client struggling—the woman was fighting drug addiction and was devastated after losing custody of her child—her social work background kicked into high gear. Fueled by a desire to give the young mother more than just legal advice, Moses helped her get treatment at a rehabilitation center, work on a parenting plan and secure a joint custody agreement with her ex-husband. “She’s doing great,” says Moses, 63, founding manager of MTR Family Law in …
Appeal to Adventure
Susan Ford Robertson attacks appellate cases with the same intensity she honed as a competitive cyclistPedaling through South Dakota during a summer after graduating from college, Susan Ford Robertson and her biking buddies kept spotting signs for Wall Drug Store, a celebrated tourist oddity at the edge of Badlands National Park. But the folksy mall was a good 50 miles away, and it wasn’t on the planned route. Undeterred, the cyclists followed their whim and detoured in search of the billboard attraction. But as the day grew longer, the winds harsher and the sun more blistering, Robertson …
Calm in the Storm
Family law attorney Nancy Cross keeps her cool when others don’tSome attorneys would have considered the client a lost cause. The woman—who had been married for 30 years, raised four children and worked alongside her husband—had been left with “virtually nothing” from a large marital estate after her divorce. That nagged at Nancy Cross, herself a divorced mother of two. “I said to her, ‘What the heck. We’ve got nothing to lose. Let’s do an appeal on this,’” says the fast-speaking managing partner of Cross, Pennamped, Woolsey & …
As Memphis as You Can Get
David M. Cook, son of a steamboat captain, challenges juries to ‘cast the first stone’David M. Cook still considers it his toughest case. His client, a radiologist, misread the X-rays of a sickly newborn who then underwent unnecessary surgery, developed an infection and died 16 days later. As if there weren’t enough hurdles in this case, the radiologist was killed in a car accident before the civil trial began and couldn’t explain to the jury why he made the mistake. The medical facts surrounding the baby’s ordeal were heart-wrenching, recalls Cook, a medical malpractice …
Ready to Wrangle
Cheryl A. Pilate and Melanie S. Morgan wage all-out war for their clientsFor months in 2007, Kansas City, Mo., attorney Cheryl A. Pilate had been trying to hire a trusted investigator who kept turning her down because he was too busy handling cases for an Olathe, Kan., lawyer named Melanie S. Morgan. Pilate was annoyed. Who was this Morgan woman, and why was she hogging all of the researcher’s time? One day Pilate arrived at a luncheon for attorneys assigned to indigent cases and sat down across from a petite, friendly looking lawyer who shook her hand and smiled. …
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