About Andrew Brandt
Andrew Brandt is an editor on Super Lawyers‘ staff. He serves as the editor for the Illinois, Northern California, Upstate New York, Missouri-Kansas, and Texas magazines, and he additionally writes, fact-checks and proofreads for numerous other Super Lawyers issues (and for the website). He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with degrees in English literature and environmental studies, and his byline has appeared in a variety of places, both online and in print.
Articles written by Andrew Brandt
Towne & Another Country
Building schools and clinics in Kenya with Jim TowneLast spring, in a village in Kenya, a 14-year-old girl with a stomachache walked over to a short drop—a hole used as a restroom—and, as Jim Towne, a trustee for the Loisaba Community Conservation Foundation recounts, “out popped a baby, placenta and umbilical cord.” At first, everyone thought the baby was dead. Then the grandmother nudged the child, and it moved. That’s when the mad dash to the hospital began. Handed the baby in a blanket, Towne led a crew in an off-road vehicle …
A Solid Foundation
How Jeffrey W. Coleman built a construction law career out of an engineering degreeI wanted to be an engineer coming out of high school. I was good at math and science and chemistry; and in those days, if you were good at those things, you were supposed to be an engineer. So I went to Iowa State—I grew up in Cedar Rapids—and I got a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, and then stayed on for a master’s degree in structural engineering. I wanted to design big structures: bridges, buildings. If you wanted to do that kind of work, you had to be in Kansas City or St. …
The J.D. from PNB
Before he cracked cases, business litigator Charles E. Newton was dancing in The NutcrackerI was kind of an athletically inclined kid, and my dad was a high school teacher. He had a student who was a three-sport athlete who I looked up to, and who suggested that I do ballet to improve my soccer game. It was hip in the late ’70s, for half a second, for athletes to take ballet classes. I remember, when I was a kid, seeing Lynn Swann, the great Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver, on PBS in tights, taking ballet classes. And so I started doing it when I was 8 years old in a tiny little …
Uphill Battle
Sean Summers of Summers Nagy shares his memories of arguing Snyder v. Phelps before the high courtBackground: On March 10, 2006, the infamous Westboro Baptist Church picketed the funeral of U.S. Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq. Snyder’s father, Albert—represented by Sean Summers, then with Barley Snyder—subsequently sued the church and its minister, Fred Phelps, for emotional distress. In 2007, a jury at the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland awarded Snyder $10.9 million (later reduced to $5 million) in damages, a verdict that would be overturned …
A South Carolina Attorney in Kosovo’s Court
How an email sent Thomas H. Pope III to law universitiesall over Eastern Europe
Throughout the past eight years, attorney Thomas H. Pope III has taught American civil procedure and litigation to law students in Hungary, Kosovo, Albania and Ukraine. And he owes it all to an email. “I didn’t know if it was legitimate or not—I get a lot of junk emails,” says Pope, a shareholder and managing member at Pope & Hudgens in Newberry. “This one, I checked into it. It’s [a nonprofit] called the Center for International Legal Studies.” One of the nonprofit’s …
The Art of Advice
David Wm. Engelman on what he’s learned after 40 years of law and a lifetime of helping the less fortunateBankruptcy attorney David Wm. Engelman has represented businesses and lenders for decades, but he might be better known for his free financial clinics for the needy. “The knowledge of the law is essentially the same, but it’s very different folks that you’re working with as clients,” he says. A practicing attorney for 40 years, Engelman has been serving the less fortunate for longer still. “My family was always involved in charitable activities—providing assistance in elderly care …
Raising the Bar
Maureen Reidy Witt stands up for a student’s rightsWhen Ebonie S. was placed in her chair and pushed up to her U-shaped desk, she was surrounded on three sides. Three becomes four if the wooden bar behind her chair, which connected the desk’s left side to its right, was secured with a barrel-bolt lock. In this position, Ebonie could no longer push her chair out from the desk; whether she could even get out—by sliding under or crawling over the bar—was a matter for dispute. “It has been referred to as a restraining desk,” says Maureen …
The ‘Criminalization of Immigration’
‘Destined for death’ in Cambodia, Socheat Chea now helps immigrants make new lives in the U.S.To say that Socheat Chea came to the United States under dire circumstances would be an understatement. In 1975, with the insurgent Khmer Rouge only five days away from taking the capital city of Phnom Penh, the Chea family—whose patriarch was a major in the army—fled Cambodia by helicopter and landed at a makeshift refugee camp on the deck of the USS Okinawa in the Gulf of Thailand. “It was clear that [if we stayed] we would probably be killed,” Chea says, who was 9 at the time. “My …
A Lawyer Like You
Vanessa López Aguilera isn’t afraid to take family law cases to courtVanessa López Aguilera began showing interest in the law around the time most teenagers start getting behind the wheel. But she’d never heard of a lawyer who shared her background. “I honestly felt like this profession was just one that white males entered, so I didn’t pursue it, and didn’t actively think that I could be a lawyer,” she says. “No one like me, that I could tell—as far as female and Hispanic—was a lawyer.” It didn’t stop her forever. After graduating from …
Amendment Done
Amy Richardson fights for same-sex rights in North CarolinaEvery once in a while, a cause comes along that a lawyer can’t ignore. For Amy Richardson, it was a case involving same-sex adoption rights. “I have two young children: a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old,” says the criminal defense attorney at Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis in Raleigh. “As a parent, I was really moved into action by the fact that these families just wanted to have equal parental rights for their kids.” In 2012, six same-sex couples filed a single lawsuit in North Carolina …
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