History

INCORPORATION

Gerald Finley worked fast after the Boston meeting to put the consensus of the founders' discussions into the formal prose of a corporate charter. He completed his work and obtained the requisite approval order of a New York Supreme Court Justice by September 20th and filed the Charter and Court Order in Albany on September 23, 1954. The Bermuda meeting proceeded as scheduled, with all-day working sessions on Friday and Saturday, November 27 and 28, 1954. In the intervening time period, two additional members had been added by common consent. They were Walter Chuck of Hawaii and Jerry Giesler of California. The total director-members then stood at 23. Only 13 were able to make the trip to Bermuda. They were Messrs. Allen, Averbach, Belli, Brumfield, Combs, DeParcq, Dooley, the brothers Finley, Lipsig, Ratner, Sindell and Wedge. This group approved the Charter as filed, hammered out revisions and amendments to a draft set of By-Laws, established an Admissions Committee, formulated the admission criteria and procedures, elected officers, and fixed the date for the first annual meeting of the full membership to be the fourth Friday in November, 1956. They estimated that it would take two years to generate enough membership for a significant annual meeting. This was double-magnitude conservatism. It only took one year.

Those first officers were Albert Averbach as President, Melvin Belli as Dean, Gerald Finley as Secretary-Treasurer, Payne Ratner, Sr. as Chairman of the Board of Directors, and Perry Nichols as Chairman of the Executive Committee. This was an unusual set of offices. There was no Vice President. The Chairman of the Board functioned to preside at all meetings of the Board of Directors. The President would preside only at the meetings of the membership, or in the absence of the Chairman. The Chairman of the Executive Committee functioned to handle duties assigned specifically by the Board of Directors. The Secretary-Treasurer had the usual duties of that office. The function of the Dean was to gather annually all information which might affect the course of action of the trial and appellate lawyer, and conduct round table sessions at Academy meetings on matters of current interest to the trial bar.

All these offices were to be filled at the annual convention meeting. Only those Directors present at the Board of Directors' meeting could vote, and the candidates for office had to be selected from the membership of the then-existing Board. The first officers were elected in Bermuda for a specific two-year period, in the expectation that the first annual meeting would not occur until November, 1956.

Over the course of years, changes were made in this executive structure. The office of "Chairman of the Executive Committee" and "Chairman of the Board of Directors" were both abolished at the annual meeting in January, 1960. They were replaced by the single, more traditional office of Vice President. During the next six years it happened that the Vice President of the prior year was duly elected President, without opposition. At the annual meeting in 1966 that practice became official. The title of the office was changed to President-Elect, and that designation continues to the present day.

The duties of the Dean evolved from leading discussions on matters of current interest to researching and delivering a learned paper, at the annual meeting, on a subject within the broad field of advocacy. The present rule that the Dean's address must be published and circulated to the entire membership was not enacted until 1967. Many of those early jewels of learning have been lost from the archives, and from memory.

Returning now to the Bermuda meeting, the final action of the Directors was to expand the membership roster. A long list of prospective Fellows was compiled from names suggested by the Directors present, or from letter suggestions of absent Directors, or from letters of application by lawyers who had heard about this prospective new honorary society After several hours of discussion, this list was reduced to 36 names meeting the unanimous approval of the Admissions Committee and the entire balance of the Board. The admission of this group was approved in advance of a formal invitation or application. This action brought into the first circle of membership such stellar trial lawyers as Lou Ashe, Russell Baker, Abraham Freedman, Francis Hare, James Markle, Craig Spangenberg and Joe Tonahill, who were all destined to serve the Academy in many capacities over the coming years.

A substantial majority on the pre-admitted list were plantiffs' lawyers, well known to the 13 Directors present. They accepted the invitation later tendered, with few exceptions. The defense lawyers on the select list were not so willing to take the risk of joining this new organization, which might diminish the prestige of the College, or hinder their political careers. So, Thomas E. Dewey did not become an early member, but no matter. The Academy would later nurture its own brood of Senators, Governors and high court Judges and Justices.

The Bermuda meeting ended with the 13 Directors present working on a second list of membership candidates to be further investigated and invited, and with instructions to the 10 absent Directors to circulate similar lists. None of them could foresee how rapidly information, and misinformation, about the Academy would circulate throughout the country. The Admissions Committee (the President and six directors), flooded the mails and phone lines getting the approval or disapproval of the whole Board for the admission of new Fellows. Nevertheless, the primary goal of high selectivity was maintained then as it is now, and no underqualified candidate slipped past the required approval of 80% of the entire Board.

THE FIRST CONVENTION

As membership approached the 100 mark, the pressure for an early meeting caused the Board to accelerate the 1956 convention date by a full year. Perry Nichols and Bill Frates co-chaired the first membership assembly at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach on Thanksgiving weekend in 1955. All the original officers had been elected for two years, and they remained in office. All 23 charter directors resigned, in accordance with New York law. They were then divided into three groups, to start a rotation system, serving respectively one, two and three year terms. Two new directors were added, Emile Zola (Zuke) Berman of New York, a great defense lawyer, and Dr. Victor Velasquez of Mexico City, our first International Director. A sad note is that Lloyd Paul Stryker had died before the first convention. His seat was left open for a year, to honor his sterling contribution to the profession.

Most of the time at this convention was used for open membership meetings, discussing issues for the good and welfare of the Academy and interchanging ideas on a host of topics then of current interest to the trial bar.  The sessions were so stimulating that every Fellow there became a missionary to gather in more keen minds to join in the debates by day and the bull sessions by night. The Class of 1955 had brought into the Academy men whose names sound like a roll call of a legal Hall of Fame, including, among others:

Horace Brown
Jim Dempsey
Sid Gislason
"Izzy" Halpern
Stew Jones
Leo Karlin
"Pat" King
Hugh Miracle
"Tom" O'Brien
Truman Rucker
"Perc" Thompson
John Watts

They all put into the Academy far more than they ever hoped to take out of it, and they all became enduring friends. That is the real secret to the growth of our fellowship.

60/40

Still, the Academy would never have reached its potential without one crucial revision of the first By-laws. Those By-laws, which came out of the Bermuda meeting, provided that the membership would include "both plaintiffs' and defendants' lawyers," but it also provided that at no time could the Academy have on its Board more than 40% of members "who devote a major portion of their time and effort to defendants' work." Section 3 of Article IV set up this rule and a procedure to categorize directorship candidates and enforce the rule. In short, the association would be bipartisan in membership, but forever remain under partisan control.

This is the one grave flaw in the founding documents. Left intact it would have produced just another little specialty club with one eye, one leg and half a voice. A special remembrance in this History is due to Art Combs. He knew that he was in the minority of Directors who had opposed Section 3, and knew there were relatively few defense lawyers in the membership at that 1955 Miami convention, yet he rose to bring the issue to the floor of the assembly. The wisdom of the membership rewarded him with an overwhelming vote striking Section 3 of Article IV in its entirety.

Looking back at it, that debate and that vote started a new era in the brotherhood of trial lawyers. In the early 50's, most plaintiffs' lawyers had the perception, whether accurate or not, that the ABA was the guardian of the corporate Establishment with a decided bias in favor of the manufacturing and Insurance industries. The American College of Trial Lawyers was viewed as an elite branch of the ABA, which pretended to be non-partisan but contained only a token percentage of plaintiffs' counsel. Certainly the defense bar was then well organized, with three different associations of insurance defense counsel and a specialty group of railroad defense counsel. Although the best of the plaintiffs' lawyers were fully equal to the best of the defense lawyers, down at the average or median level the defense teams which tried cases once a week were better trained, better financed, and had a more impressive array of expert witnesses than the general practitioner who tried a case only once every two or three years.

It is understandable that the first-magnitude leaders of the plaintiffs' bar did not want to found an honor society which might be taken over by a defense crowd that would seat them below the salt. Their solution, as noted, was to make sure they stayed equal by being more equal -three to two.

They should not have been so protective. Times were changing. That is what NACCA was all about, with its seminars and trial demonstrations in every state. That is what Hubert Winston Smith's Law-Science Academy was all about, touring the country to teach trial skills and traumatic medicine to packed audiences. The Practicing Law Institute, and Perry Nichols' Stetson University Annual Seminars, featured brilliant lecturers and authors who gave away extravagantly all their hard-won experience in trial strategy and technique, and all they knew of effective persuasion. In short, the level of competence of the adversary lawyers in contested trial was fast approaching that fair and equal balance which the jury trial system justly demands.

During this same time period, the defense bar was at first not nearly so generous in giving away its treasures. Trial skills were regarded as trade secrets, not to be disclosed to a competitor who might take away the Aetna or State Farm retainer. As the prestige and prosperity of the plaintiffs' bar began to bloom, the defense bar came to realize that all trial skills are interchangeable. Defense leaders joined the Academy to exchange ideas with each other, and to adapt the plaintiffs' latest attack strategies into new defense countermeasures. The day would later come when litigation became so respectable that a plaintiff Xerox would sue an IBM, although no one could have foreseen that in 1955.

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