Tag: law

DORTHY’S RUBY RED SLIPPERS

September 23rd, 2025

It’s not every day you get a call from the sheriff but I got one from Sheriff Al Cannon asking me to help a former police officer abandoned by his lawyer the Friday before he was scheduled to begin a wrongful termination trial in Federal Court. It’s hard saying no to the sheriff, so I agreed to see what I could do.

        I spoke with the former police officer and learned his lawyer had demanded a ridiculous upfront payment for the trial and, when he couldn’t afford it, the lawyer filed a motion to be relieved as his lawyer. A hearing on the motion was scheduled to be heard that Friday afternoon. I asked him what the case was about and he told me he had been fired by the Charleston Police Department for allegedly associating with a known criminal, but the real reason he was fired was because he refused to lie about drugs having been planted on somebody during a search. Well, now, an honest cop being fired for refusing to lie about planted drugs sounded right up my alley. You’d think I’d have known there was more to the story than what I was being told.

        I had never personally appeared before Judge Houck before and entered my appearance at the beginning of the hearing: J. Kevin Holmes, appearing on behalf of the Plaintiff for the purpose of opposing his current counsel’s motion to be relieved and, if that motion is granted, to move for a continuance so I can prepare to represent him at trial. I don’t think Judge Houck even looked up or asked me to bend over before ruling from the bench, “The motion to be relieved is granted. The motion for a continuance is denied. We’ll see you for trial first thing Monday morning counselor.” I was dumbstruck, which is probably a good thing because if I’d have been to talk, I’d probably been held in contempt for uttering a string of profanities the likes of which has never been heard in a courtroom.

        The enormity of what I’d gotten myself in was just beginning to seep in as I was walking down the courthouse steps and ran into lawyer Bob Haley coming up the other way. I must have looked shellshocked because Bob asked out of genuine concern if I was okay. Still flustered I blurted it out what had just happened as best I could and to my utter amazement, Bob offered to jump right onto my flaming dirigible and help with the trial.

        Bob and I had tried the Columbian dentist case against each other and were both experienced trial attorneys. For those of you who may not be, getting a case ready for trial under normal circumstances is an enormous undertaking. You have to put together your trial notebook starting with jury selection. That requires going over the jury list and the jurors answers to a questionnaire trying to divine who to exclude and who to seat. You have to prepare your pretrial brief giving your version of the facts, identifying legal issues anticipated to arise, who your witnesses will be, and what exhibits you intend to introduce. You have to research and prepare any pretrial motions you’ll want to file. Research and write out the jury instruction you’ll want the judge to charge. Make outlines of the testimony you’ll expect to elicit from each witness. Meet with and prepare your witnesses for their trial testimony. Copy and mark all of the trial exhibits. And, write out your opening statement for the jury. To do all this over the course of one weekend in a case you knew nothing about to start with would take nothing short of a miracle.

        Bob and I camped out in my firm’s library and got started reviewing the file the client’s former lawyer had turned over to us. Needless to say, he hadn’t done any of things I just listed to get ready for trial. Remember when I said I should have known there was more to the story than what I had been told? Well, when we read through the file it didn’t take long for Bob and I to discover our client had settled his wrongful termination suit against the City. That’s right, signed a release and settled it. When we confronted him with this rather inconvenient fact, he sheepishly said he only accepted the settlement because he was allowed to resign with no finding misconduct on his part and he’d been offered a job as a deputy with the Sheriff’s Office but that the City had breached the agreement by recommending to the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy they revoke his certificate needed to be a law enforcement officer in South Carolina. This explained the Sheriff’s interest in the case, but you don’t have to be a legal scholar to figure out its pretty damned hard to sue for wrongful termination from a job you voluntarily resigned from.

Now we realized the case we’d signed up for wouldn’t be about an honest cop fired for refusing to lie about planted drugs, it would be about whether the City fraudulently concealed their intent to recommend his license be suspended to induce the settlement and release. Deepening the legal quicksand we found ourselves in up to our eyeballs, the client’s prior worthless lawyer hadn’t plead fraud in the inducement nor had he conducted any discovery how the City’s recommendation our client’s license be revoked came about.

        Bob and I were left grasping for nonexistent straws when something extraordinary happened. Opposing counsel, Carol Ervin, a very seasoned trial attorney called us on the phone. Carol may have been small in stature, but any lawyer dumb enough to underestimate her courtroom prowess would be making huge mistake. She specialized in employment law and was tough as nails. But late that Friday afternoon she called us to let us know she thought Judge Houck’s denial of a continuance was grossly unfair. To the extent ethically possible, she offered to do anything she could to help bring us up to speed for the trial. Truth is Bob and I already knew there wasn’t much she or anybody was going to be able to do to help us out of the impossible situation we found ourselves in but somehow Carol reaching out to us lifted our spirits and gave us the fortitude to hunker down and do our level best as lawyers to turn the chicken shit we’d been handed into chicken salad.

        Bob and I spent Friday night hitting the library books looking for cases in which a settlement agreements had been set aside. Each time we found something encouraging further research shot us down. We crashed and burned so many different ways it was probably around two a.m. that Bob and I became giddy and started laughing. Bob came up with the notion we should send Carol copies of the cases we’d found pretending they’d save our asses but mostly just so she’d knew we were working ungodly hours while she was sleeping soundly. Somewhere around three thirty that morning, for reasons vaguely related to the unreal situation we found ourselves in and Dorothy saying, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Carol became Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz. I think it was Bob who quoted Dorothy as saying, “Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my!” when our research ran into another dead end.

        Carol picked up on our silliness and called us on Saturday. She wasn’t fooled for a second by our caselaw but was impressed by how much fun Bob and I were having. She liked being compared to Dorthy and, I suspect, started to think of us as the Scarecrow and Lion knowing we both already had heart and courage but were somewhat lacking in brains. It was the first of many phone calls and much laughter we shared over that weekend.

        Monday morning came and against all odds Bob and I were ready as anybody could be for trial. I think even Judge Houck felt a little guilty for his Friday ruling and couldn’t help but be impressed by all the hard work Bob and I had put in over the weekend. Of course, that didn’t stop him from cutting us off at the knees every chance he got and directing a verdict in favor of the City at the close of our case. We were exhausted but held our heads high leaving the courthouse that afternoon knowing we’d done our best to help an honest cop whose worthless lawyer had him stranded on the eve of trial.

        We didn’t win the case but our client made out okay. He became a private investigator for one of South Carolina’s premier criminal defense attorneys who regularly stuck it to the City Police Department that had treated him so unfairly. I don’t know for certain but I’d wager he made twice as much as a private investigator than he ever would have made as a Sheriff’s deputy. And me, who had more fun practicing law than almost any lawyer I ever knew, never had more fun winning a case with another lawyer than I had losing the case with Bob. If there’s a higher compliment one trial lawyer can pay another, I don’t know what it is. And we made a friend of Carol Ervin. Bob and I went down to Bob Ellis shoe store on King Street and bought her a pair of woman’s shoes we painstakingly glued ruby red sequins to that we gave to her as present to remember our trial by.
A/K/A BUNNY

December 12th, 2024

Prosecutors with the United States Attorney’s Office have a 95% conviction rate and can get to thinking they’re invincible in the courtroom. But that sometimes makes them lazy. “Useless attorneys,” as we in the defense bar affectionately called them, can be beaten, sometimes by their own conceit.

I represented Jerelyn Grimes a/k/a Bunny who got herself caught up in an FBI sting operation. The FBI set up a fake chop shop in Berkeley County where they videotaped thieves fencing cars stolen in the Charleston area. Ms. Grimes didn’t appear in any of their videotapes but one of those cars belonged to her. Her chronically unemployed husband wanted her to trade in her car so he could get a pick-up truck and into the contracting business. A little thing like her refusal didn’t keep her good-for-nothing husband from selling her car to a fence and telling her to report it stolen to her insurance company. Technically she was charged with insurance fraud and the Useless Attorney prosecuting her case didn’t think her having to pay for the car she no longer had was a defense. He was probably right legally but Jeralyn didn’t and flat out refused to plead guilty.

We drew the Honorable David C. Norton as our trial judge. Judge Norton truly enjoyed being a judge and never lost his sense of humor as so many other judges do. But even he wasn’t real happy when Mrs. Grimes was the only defendant out twenty-three caught up in the sting who refused to plead guilty and he was stuck having to draw a jury for a trial. I wasn’t too happy either as I didn’t know what Jeralyn’s defense might be. I figured, the worse case scenario was the trial would be a slow motion guilty plea hopefully dissipating any urge for retribution from Judge Norton’s mind.

And so the case of the United States of America versus Jeralyn Grimes a/k/a Bunny was called for trial in the United States Courthouse in Charleston. For some unfathomable reason the U.S. Attorney felt compelled to refer to Mrs. Grimes as Jeralyn Grimes a/k/a Bunny every time he mentioned her name in his opening statement. Like Bunny was the nickname of som dangerous gun moll girlfriend of a badass gangster. Knowing I’d certainly bring it up if he didn’t, the prosecutor conceded to the jury it was her husband who sold her car to the fence who sold it to the FBI but he insisted it was Jeralyn Grimes a/k/a Bunny who falsely reported her car stolen to her insurance companythus violating the law. He gravely intoned in his summation it would be the jury’s duty to convict Jeralyn Grimes a/k/a Bunny of the offense charged as he concluded his opening.

As I stood up to begin my opening I put my hand on Jeralyn’s shoulder, then walked over before the jury box and waited until I had their full attention before saying, “When I asked Ms. Grimes how she got the name Bunny, she told me it was the nickname her father gave her when she was born on Easter Sunday.” That got two or three chuckles from the jury and broke the ice. The jury’s receptiveness grew stronger as the trial proceeded and I got each witness for the prosecution to admit Ms. Grines had never committed any criminal offense ever, it was her car bought and paid for with her hard-earned money, sold by worthless husband WHO WASN’T EVEN CHARGED without her permission or her receiving one red cent of the money. The prosecution witnesses’ fumbled their attempts to explain how her car wasn’t in fact stolen just like she told her insurance company. Things weren’t going well for the U.S. Attorney and they were about to get worse.

I noticed the prosecution hadn’t produced the videotape of Jeralyn’s car actually being sold to the fake FBI chop shop and, figuring it could only reinforce Ms. Grines having nothing to do with the sale, so I asked the agent if he had a copy of the videotape we could play the jury. The agent fidgeted on the witness stand and began looking at the U.S. Attorney for guidance. Like I said, useless attorneys can be lazy and I don’t think he’d had ever bothered to watch the tape. He couldn’t think of any reason to object, so decided to make a big deal of finding the tape to show the jury as if to say, I have nothing to hide. It took a few minutes for the prosecutor to find the tape and set up the video monitor all of which served to increase the suspense.

The videotape was shot from behind the FBI agent’s desk looking at the back of the agent’s head but you could tell it was the same agent who was testifying. The camera captured the fence, one of the defendant’s who had already plead guilty and was awaiting sentencing, being greeted like a long lost friend by the agent. They sat yucking it up in the agent’s office revealing they knew each other from prior dealings. The FBI agent knew the fence well enough to know he’d been arrested for auto theft in Berkeley County and had recently pled guilty before the Honorable Richard E. Fields, one of the first African American Judges we had in South Carolina. He asked the fence how he’d made out on his guilty plea and the fence replied, “The little nigger gave me probation.” Both the FBI agent and fence erupted in raucous laughter on the tape but the jury sat stone faced not thinking it was funny in the slightest and even the hapless U.S. Attorney realized he’d lost them.

What a defense attorney lives for are the words “we the jury find the defendant not guilty.” That is what the foreman of the jury said as he read the verdict but then added “and we have a few other things we’d like to say” which caught Judge Norton’s attention. He quickly gaveled the foreman to stop and explained, having found the defendant not guilty, there was nothing else the jury needed to say before quickly thanking them for their service and excusing them from the courtroom. Jeralyn gave me a great big hug and I celebrated a rare Federal Court acquittal but, as other cases required my attention, I moved on and almost forgot about her. Until maybe a month later, when I got a call out of the blue from Judge Norton.

He kindly congratulated me on my not guilty verdict and mentioned the fence was scheduled to appear before him for sentencing on a cooperating witness guilty plea negotiated between the U.S Attorney and his lawyer. He wanted to make sure it was the same fence who’d laughed about Judge Fields giving him probation on the tape during the trial. I said he was but suspected Judge Norton knew exactly who the fence was and just wanted me to know the fence’s sentence wasn’t going to be probation this time around.
Address to Injured Workers’ Advocates upon my partner, David T. Pearlman, receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award

October 10th, 2024

David T. Pearlman

There are many ways to measure a man.

You can measure a man as a friend.

I first met David Pearlman when we were both undergraduates attending different colleges in Washington, DC in 1971 and have counted him as a friend ever since. It was the summer after he’d journeyed to India and Nepal where he told me stories of how they smeared sacrificial animal blood on taxi cabs to ward off evil spirits. As strange and wonderful as his journey sounded, it would be nothing compared to the journey our friendship would take over the next 53 years.

Making friends is a trait David undoubtedly inherited from his father, Judge Gus Pearlman, who ran unopposed for what has to be the most contentious judicial office there is, Probate Judge. A lawyer friend once called to tell David he’d really hit it off with his father who’d gone out of his way to help resolve a particularly nasty probate dispute. David didn’t want to quash this lawyer’s belief he’d made a new judicial friend, but explained his father treated everybody who appeared before him like a friend. And David didn’t fall far from that tree. Treating everyone like a friend is why so many opposing lawyers would be among the first to join me in calling David a friend.

Injured Worker’s Advocates never had a better friend than David Pearlman who served as its chair and co-chair of the Legislative Affairs Committee through the organizations darkest days.

You can measure a man as a business partner. David recruited me to work at the Steinberg Law Firm in 1980. The firm’s founder, Irving Steinberg, helped draft South Carolina’ s very first Workers’ Compensation Act and already had an unrivaled tradition of protecting the rights of injured workers, but David would take that tradition to a whole new level.

I can’t tell you how many nights, after a long day working at the office, David would get into his car and drive to some far-flung corner of South Carolina to attend a political reception. Those of you who have been lucky enough to attend such receptions know doing so in and of itself constitutes service above and beyond the call of duty. But, while others begrudgingly wrote checks, often as a result of David’s pervasive arm twisting, David hand delivered those checks so he could become personal friends with the legislators. It was that personal touch making friends that would make all the difference in the world later the chips were down. And, the chips were down more often than I care to remember. Down so far injured workers were being counted OUT. But each time, David would rally the troops as our Legislative Chairperson to save the day.

It’s why David became a lawyer. He grew up in the 60’s, a time when our country was every bit as divided as it is today, through the worst of segregation, the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK, the protests of the Vietnam War, but it was also the time of the birth of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, equal rights for women, and men landing on the moon. David became a lawyer because he wanted to be an instrument for change. And he was.

He was what I describe as the Tom Sawyer of thwarting the so-called workers compensation reform movement. David gave those of us who joined with him the opportunity to do something important and worthwhile protecting and expanding the rights of injured workers and to have fun doing it. Like, the time when NCCI proposed an outrageous 34% workers’ comp insurance rate increase, to rile up employer’s as a precursor for yet another legislative push to gut the Worker’s Compensation Act. David cajoled Bill Smith and me into challenging the rate increase in the Administrative Law Court. Now I wouldn’t try and suggest a week long hearing before an ALJ is anybody’s idea of fun but it had its moments.

Not satisfied with simply asking for a 34% rate hike, the insurance companies wanted to cut claimant’s lawyers out of the system by regulating contingency fees. One day, after Bill finished forcing the double-talking actuarial experts to admit injured workers paying their own lawyers’ did not effect insurance rates one iota on cross examination, Bill and I were walking down the hall leading to the elevators when we overheard the silk stocking insurance lawyers fussing in loud voices that next time they should just leave the claimant’s lawyers out of it so they wouldn’t have to deal with riff-raft claimants’ lawyers like Bill and me. Let me say, thank you, David, for giving rift raft like us a good laugh while doing something good for injured workers at the same time.

And, that’s nothing. If you really want to have some fun, learn how to draft legislation because, when the insurance company lobbyists conjured up one draconian law after another to gut the system, Daivd came up with the brilliant strategy to turn that effort around on them by drafting our own wish list of amendments to present to the legislature. It felt like Christmas drafting amendments to give injured workers the right to choose their own doctors, expand coverage for mental-mental injuries for police officers, fireman, and first responders, and give injured workers the right to choose between a scheduled award or wage loss. While none of David’s amendments ever made it to the floor for a vote that was because the insurance lobby pulled their proposed bills rather than face votes on his amendments by those very same legislators David spent so much time befriending and supporting. David found that even the most conservative politicians can agree on the importance of giving injured workers a fair shake.

One of the most important fights David took on occurred after the legislative efforts failed and Governor Mark Sanford decided to gut the comp system by Executive Order. The unanimous rejection of the Governor’s executive order seeking to limit compensation awards to the stingy rating of the AMA Guide was David’s crowning achievement. Had David’s relentless efforts failed, I have no doubt the comp act as we know it would have been executive ordered right out of existence.

David’s modesty won’t allow, and I would be remiss, if I didn’t acknowledge it took the hard work of many members of this organization to defeat the repeated attacks on the workers’ compensation system. But, I can say all of us who volunteered to join with him in the struggle, all of us friends, lawyers, and members of this organization, would acknowledge it was David Pearlman who motivated, guided, and coordinated our efforts. It was his vision that saw us and the workers of South Carolina through those troubled times.

We can all thank David it has been years since the insurance lobby has come after worker’s compensation but we must be vigilant that the lull doesn’t turn into complacency. I promise you there’s an insurance company actuary right now calculating how many more millions of dollars can be made taking away the rights of working men and women.

It is perhaps hardest of all to measure a man as a lawyer. Monetary success is surely one measure by which David excelled. He wasn’t so much a rainmaker as he was one of those atmospheric rivers we hear about nowadays. But success would be the last measure David would want to be measured by. He is as proud of the fights he lost as those he won. When an unrepresented claimant whose skull was literally crushed by a bulldozer had his case for lifetime benefits and medical care closed on a grossly unfair clincher agreement, David wouldn’t let it stand unchallenged. It was a fight he wouldn’t win but David is proud to this day the Commission won’t approve clincher settlements in brain injury cases without a hearing to protect unrepresented claimants. When a police officer’s mental-mental injury was denied because a police officer seeing the two year old daughter run over and smashed like a watermelon by a police cruiser driven by her friend and fellow officer wasn’t unusual or extraordinary enough to be compensable, David wouldn’t let it stand unchallenged. When two trips to the Supreme Court failed to reverse the injustice, David didn’t give up and made progress seeking a legislative change restoring compensability to first responders for mental-mental injuries. But his work remains unfinished and more still needs to be done.

As a lawyer, David Pearlman, was what I call a lawyer’s lawyer. A lawyer other lawyers came to for help with their most difficult cases. David didn’t shy away from hard cases; he fought the hard cases to make it easier for all injured workers to receive just and fair compensation. There are no cases more difficult than toxic exposure cases. The latency period between the exposure and the injury and the expense of proving causation caused other lawyers to shy away. But not David. He took on the injured workers of the Lockheed plant in Charleston that made helicopter parts during the Vietnam War. The plant no longer existed requiring David to reconstruct the processes and exposures from records and employee testimony. He had all the surviving employees medically surveyed to document clusters of medical ilnesses. He put together a blue ribbon team of medical doctors, epidemiologists, and industrial hygienists to correlate the clusters to the employee’s exposures. And devised a bifurcated hearing procedure to deal first with liability on a global basis and then compensation on an individual basis.

The workers’ compensation act that was drafted by Irving Steinberg in 1936 did a good job of compensating broken bones and severed limbs, but David dedicated his legal career to making it easier for workers injured by repetitive trauma, toxic exposures, and PTSD in today’s modern workplace to receive just and fair compensation. Ordinary lawyers look backwards and apply precedent to decide cases. Great lawyers look forward and use the spirit of the law to address new challenges.

By any measure,

as a friend,

as a partner,

as a lawyer’s lawyer,

as a tireless crusader for the rights of injured workers,

David Pearlman earned the Lifetime Achievement Award presented to him. He would only ask that the giving of the award not just as a recognition of his achievements but also as encouragement to the future recipients to take David’s baton and run with it. To find satisfaction working with friends and fellow lawyers protecting and expanding the rights of injured workers. The fight David Pearlman fought for all the years it has been my privilege to call him

my friend,

my partner, and

my fellow lawyer.

Tag: law

DORTHY’S RUBY RED SLIPPERS

A/K/A BUNNY

Address to Injured Workers’ Advocates upon my partner, David T. Pearlman, receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award