aily wednesday, June 17, 2015
eport a smart read for smart readers
Lifetime Achievement Awards
Earning Reputation as One of Nation’s Top Corporate Defense Litigators
By Ann Wo o l ner
‘‘
Being female
helped me stand out from other lawyers. It meant I needed to perform well.”
Growing up in the 1940s and ’50s in Opelika, Alabama, her father a farmer, her mother a teacher, Chilton Davis Varner assumed she’d help build her husband’s career and raise a family. Then, in Atlanta, while sitting in as a receptionist and bookkeeper at her husband’s startup law firm, she realized she’d rather do what he was doing. Varner entered Emory University School of Law at age 30 and scheduled her classes and homework around family responsibilities. She worried whether she’d done the right thing in going back to school— until her turn at moot court. “I liked being on my feet, I liked having to persuade somebody— a judge or a jury,” she says, “and I liked the competition of it.” With litigation, “I had found the part of practicing law that my skill set matched up with.” Because her husband, Morgan, was winning the family bread as a lawyer, she thought she’d go into public interest law. But during summer 1975, after her second year of law school, Varner clerked at King
& Spalding. It became home. The first female partner on the firm’s litigation team and now senior partner in the products liability section, Varner is widely lauded as one of the top corporate defense litigators in the country. She’s worked as lead counsel in multidistrict litigation, and she’s tried and won bellwether cases. She’s beaten down claims that pharmaceutical products caused femur fractures, deadened jaw bones and led to birth defects; that automotive defects were to blame for people burning to death; that breast implants sickened women. She helped defend the Coca-Cola Co. in a long-running suit brought by bottlers, resulting in a win for Coke. She is now co-leading the national defense against claims that Purdue Pharma understated the addictive nature of pain killer Oxycontin. In those cases, courts have denied plaintiffs class status 10 times and dismissed more than 400 suits. “Representing the corporate, product manufacturer requires you
to be a better lawyer,” says Varner. The plaintiffs have suffered some terrible harm, perhaps the loss of a loved one, and people naturally feel for them. “Very few people are sympathetic about corporate entities,” she adds. That’s why she believes these cases are David and Goliath contests— with the corporation as David. To persuade a jury not to blame the company for the plaintiff’s suffering, the defense lawyer must gather, understand and then communicate facts that often involve engineering or scientific or otherwise technical evidence. “You have to learn it from the ground up,” she says. “And you have to be able to explain it to a jury.” “It’s challenging,” she adds, but she enjoys that her work demands that she learn so much about such disparate matters. Like her law partner, Patricia T. Barmeyer, Varner started out when few women were practicing law, much less litigating. Each of them recalls appearing before judges in the rural South who had never seen
Daily Report June 17, 2015
chilton davis varner
a female attorney. “I didn’t waste a lot of time trying to fit myself into or out of that mold as a pioneer,” Varner says. She just would just keep working, keep learning and “hope that I didn’t make a big mistake.” Likewise, it was a new thing for women to break into the upper reaches of the corporate world. She recalls a hush coming over Pontiac’s huge executive dining room outside Detroit in the 1970s when she first walked in, carrying a briefcase and wearing a suit, so rare was it for a woman to be seen there. “Being female helped me stand out from other lawyers,” she says. “It meant I needed
to perform well.” She performed well enough to be inducted into the invitation-only American College of Trial Lawyers in 1995. With about 5,000 members from the United States and Canada, the group includes litigators from both sides of civil law and both sides of criminal law. “They’re the very best at what they do,” she says. Their trial records are vetted and their home-state colleagues are consulted before they’re invited to join. The college elected her president three years ago, making her the second woman in the group’s first 63 years to lead it. She was the third King & Spalding lawyer to be presi-
dent, after the late Griffin B. Bell and Frank C. Jones. She has also served on the Federal Rules Advisory Committee of mostly judges, and on a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit group studying gender bias. She served for 18 years on Emory University’s board of trustees too. Next year will mark Varner’s 40th year at King & Spalding. Now 72, she says, “I could not have found a better home as a lawyer.” Reprinted with permission from the 6/17/15 edition of the DAILY REPORT © 2015 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited. Contact: 877-257-3382
[email protected] or visit www.almreprints.com. # 451-06-15-12