By Dan McCue
Staff Writer

“We knew each other.”

These four simple words, uttered by former Sen. Ernest F. “Fritz” Hollings early on in “Crossing the Charleston Bar: A Contemporary History of the Charleston Bar Association,” a new documentary produced by the Charleston County Bar Association, not only define the theme of the 70-minute film, but says much about the reason it was made.

Nearing his 60th year as a member of the association, Hollings cuts a dignified and thoughtful figure in the documentary, which has been privately distributed to more than 1,600 attorneys in town. He appears never so wistful as when he describes an era in which litigation could be resolved with a handshake or, at the very least, over a cup of coffee.

“When I started in 1947, there were perhaps 100 lawyers at the bar,” Hollings recalled for documentarian Richard Reed. “You didn’t know who they were from radio or television. You’d meet them at Byers Drug Store downtown and you’d have coffee, talk to each other and settle cases and dispose of cases.

“Today, everything is e-mail. Lawyers don’t know each other, don’t talk to each other and as a result, don’t understand each other. We had coffee every morning. In fact I can remember Tom Stoney presiding out on the sidewalk in front of his office,” Hollings said, softening. “Oh, he was a cracker jack.”

Film recaptures the ‘glory days’

People are inclined from time to time to look back and declare that things were “different then,” somehow “better than they are now.” But few get the itch to try to do something to document the difference. Attorney Francis X. McCann is part of that rarified company.

McCann was the driving force behind “Crossing the Charleston Bar,” a documentary that tells the story of the practice of law in the city before the days of astronomical jury verdicts and endless fictional accounts of lawyers on network television.

Best of all, it tells that story in the words and voices of a handful of the area’s elder statesmen and stateswomen in the hope, as its narrator says, that viewers “will remember, with advantages, the wisdom of their journey.”

Among those who lend their thoughts are Morris D. Rosen, B. Allston Moore Jr., Joseph H. McGee, Ruth Williams Cupp and T. Allan Legare Jr.

“Things were different (when Hollings began to practice), and they were different when I entered the profession in the late 1970s,” McCann said a few days after U.S. District Judge Patrick M. Duffy gave a copy of the DVD to U.S. Chief Justice John G. Roberts during his recent visit here. “There was a time when the legal community in Charleston was a tight-knit community.

“It’s impossible to recapture that, of course, the legal community here and across the state having grown so large, but I think that perhaps by remembering the individuals in the film and rehearing their stories, people might be reminded of and embrace some of the attributes of those times.”

McCann first started thinking about commissioning a documentary two years ago, after a Charleston County Bar Association gathering.

“It seemed like every year we’d meet and memorialize one or two members while admitting another 90 or 100, and somewhere in between you began to sense a change in the organization,” he said.

Between 1947, when Hollings began practicing downtown, and 1978, when McCann joined the bar, the community of local layers grew from about 100 members to 350 members.

Even then, “cordiality was maintained,” McCann said. “You understood cases come and go, and nothing was personal. You strove to serve the law and you strove to serve justice.”

Today, however, McCann fears the law evolved too far from being a profession and a calling and too close to being considered just another business, with a decided decline in the decorum.

“I lay the problem at the feet of the U.S. Supreme Court, which allowed attorneys to advertise,” Moore said. “To me, that is the most awful commercialization of law I can conceive of.”

Picking up the sentiment, Legare said when he entered the profession, “the best advertisement you could get was to be appointed to a case as a young lawyer and try the case in court.”

Other dramatic changes that disrupted the collegial atmosphere of the old Charleston bar, according to the documentary subjects, include the instruction of discovery and depositions into litigation and billable hours.

“I can’t tell you how many Citadel football games I missed over the years preparing for a trial Monday morning, and I never billed anybody for that time,” Hollings said. “Today you can bill someone just for sitting on your fanny.”

To a person, the lawyers in the documentary describe the Charleston bar for much of the last half of the 20th Century as a polite and somewhat gentile slice of society, one dominated by graduates of the University of South Carolina School of Law, in which many members also belong to the Charleston Yacht and Hunt clubs.

“One of the wonderful things about practicing law in Charleston is that generations of families have gone into law and retained as clients the generations of families that went into business,” said Cupp.

In fact, Rosen recalled being one of the few “outsiders” who came to practice in Charleston after serving in the U.S. Coast Guard. His early struggles included finding a place to practice “because there were no big firms to hire you then;” finding clients, something he began to resolve after joining the Veterans of Foreign Wars; and finding housing.

No plans for a sequel

Attorney Marvin D. Infinger of the law firm of Haynsworth, Sinkler and Boyd PA, served on the bar committee that helped McCann see the project through to completion. He said while some might think the recollections in the documentary might have been sugar-coated by time, they ring true to his ear.

“I joined the bar a year after Frank McCann, and I can assure you things were different then,” Infinger said. “When I came to the bar in Charleston and joined what was then Sinkler, Gibbs and Simmons, it was the largest firm in town, and I was only the 11th lawyer on the staff.”

“Today I think firms are a little more ensconced. Back then, the older fellows made sure you know the people you needed to know, and partners took the young professionals to meet the judges and so forth,” he said.

Because the bar has gotten so large, “there’s not near as much cordiality,” Infinger said. “Years ago, it was rare when after you’d tried a case and won that your opponent would not send you a letter or call to congratulate you. I don’t think that happens very much at all anymore.”

But if “Crossing the Charleston Bar” can be interpreted on one level as an indictment of some of the changes the law profession in Charleston has undergone over the years, the response to the film since it was mailed out in August has been overwhelmingly positive from young and old practitioner alike.

“The response, from what I’ve heard, has just been wonderful,” Infinger said. “I’ve heard people use words like ‘touching’ and ‘funny’ to describe it, and I even received a little handwritten note along with some legal documents that said, ‘Wow, Marvin, we really enjoyed the DVD.’”

For now, at least, there are no plans for wider distribution of the documentary nor for a sequel, although Infinger has an inkling that there may be one down the line.

“But that’ll probably be left to the next generation of Charleston lawyers who want to look back at how their ‘used to be’ used to be. After all, everybody has their own definition of what constitutes the glory days,” he said.

Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@charlestonbusiness.com.

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